Oh great, another generic match # game. I don't see what all the fuss is abou- OHMYGAWD SKILL TREE. For serious though, this is kind of a unique twist on the matching genre. Click the gems that don't match to make a match? Brilliant.
Also, a bug to abuse possibly until they fix it: If you find yourself never making a true profit with your shop, reload the page after the 'end of days sells' note comes up saying what you made. The day will be the same as before you opened shop but all sales will still have went through, including your achievements. A nice way to abuse this is to adventure until nearly full on items, and then stock all your items and sell them in about 5 page refreshes to keep your debt from going faster then you can pay it back early on.
Ok, serious critique time. I can see how this game is trying for a Puzzle Quest style and trying to make it more friendly to us players by NOT ADDING AN OMNIPOTENT AI TO SHARE THE BOARD, so I thank you for that. But, at the same time, it still suffers from an extreme but unfortunately hard to fix 'luck factor' that often cripples RPG element-style games. The scramble feature is nice to abuse, but if I might ask, make scrambles less severe. Say, each scramble takes away more mana per use in battle, instead of a complete nuke each time.
An example of a good store-management game: Recettear. There was no day limits, you could always stock the items you needed and not require insane amounts of money, there was an adventuring mode to make it fresh and not just tell NPC "Oh hey, do this quest.", and the list goes on. As far as management games goes, this one totally blows, just another cash-dump game looking for a quick buck. 1/5. Try harder next time.
I find it amusing people throw a hate-card at a flash game designer putting a $5 paid-content add-on for a game, usually with the excuse that times are tough, and yet readily pony up $60 for Portal 2.
Would be a great game if there was actually any balance to be had in the match selection. I don't care about getting a 200+ exp bonus for it, I really don't want to go up against a player three times my level, loaded.
At first I was like, "UFO what? Why does everyone hate them so?" and then I saw a UFO -CHASE- my squirrel. It's all fun and games until the games have fun with you.
Along my long and lonesome path to the neverending journey to find the castle of which I seek, I have purchased many interestingly named sets of equipment. Imagine my surprise, if you will, when I purchased a spellbook called "Spellbook". Nothing more, nothing less.
Umm. Wait. You decide to take away hotkeys to balance the game...When BEING HIT CAUSES YOUR DELAY TO REDUCE ANYWAY? That's unacceptable. 1/5 until either there is hotkeys, autofire, or being hit doesn't cause delay.
Wow. Really? On level 4, where there is two exits and entrances, a heli can choose to go on the very edge of the map and bypass essentially any chance of being shot down for easy lives unless you stupidly placed rockets on the edges to begin with?
It makes a nice story, and yet, it's not much of an actual game, like many people say. I think the opinion accurately being put up is that this is too simple, too short, and too narrow to be listed as a game. Sure enough, you can move left and right, using three button combinations even! But we're above pong-controls I believe. It's a nice and strong moral concept and story, but I don't feel like it's actually a game, more or less a 'choose an ending/who dies'. I won't go as far as to say this is a bad 1/5 submission just because it isn't a game, but I will say I'm disappointed that all it does is try to show us a message, with very little actual gameplay. It's a solid message, but not a solid game.
Welcome to luck based mission: The RPG. Any game where I picked easy to start, and lose because all potential combos occur on the opponents turn due to the drop factor, is not going far in my book. As I always say in these kinds of games, make PREVIEW lines to see what will drop next in those rows! It adds strategy and less luck-is-a-failure. As is, this is hardly worthy of anything more then 2/5.
And a third post for added coolness. If I can suggest positive critique, the game would be improved vastly if there was some less luck added and more strategy: Add one or two 'next row' blocks, so you can see what actually drops! It's an absolute pain setting up the opponent for EVERY COMBO EVER because you don't know what will drop next: I've been hit by way too many 'oh hey thx for the 4 way combo' or 'lololol thx for the attack gem', because it was next in line and I wasn't clued in.
This plays very, very oddly like another game I know with four elements, physical attacks, golds, leveling and masteries and...wait. I know. Puzzle Master. Regardless if it was intentional to make a game based off of it, this game has the same problems as the aforementioned game: It's all a luck based mission, with getting the right combos to drop in your favor, and the CPU seems to always pick out the 4-5 way 90% of the time, but has a terrible spell-use AI. I'm afraid this is a 2 star effort, at best, looking past the Puzzle Master influence.
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LOL