Judgement: Not Recommended
View review on Steam
TLDR: Do not buy unless you want to do exactly what you see in the images over 100 times.
This game is an acceptable puzzle game to waste your time with. However, I am a bit shocked at the $8 price tag for something that feels just like an old free mobile game, but without ads. The gameplay is simple and fun for the first hour, but you soon realize that you're asked to do the same thing over and over again in about 10 different maps with slightly increasing difficulty. The only thing that seems to change is the upgrades of the powerups, which do not seem to matter as much as you would think. However the main reason I am giving this a negative review is because of some fundamentally flawed game design decisions that simply make this game tiring.
Here are some examples:
- The orb selected to be thrown will change color whenever any color stops having any presence on the level even when the orb you are holding is not that color. For example, you could be holding blue, ready to launch it at an appropriate position, but a chain reaction in another part of the level caused all greens to disappear and without warning your orb could change to red while you are shooting it, causing you to mess up.
- Powerups are not as helpful as they seem. In many of the "harder" levels, with twisting paths and multiple pushers, it can easily become impossible for you to pick them up and will sometimes even move to an impossible to reach position on their own. They also take a random amount of time to finish (fireflies, meteor strike, etc.), meaning that a player might be forced into doing an incorrect move thinking that the powerup was done.
- Orb placement has proved to be a bit inconsistent. While shooting two orbs in succession from the exact same position, they ended up being placed in different locations.
- There is no penalty for throwing away orbs.
- The speed at which the orbs move is quite varying and hard to predict.
This game is an acceptable puzzle game to waste your time with. However, I am a bit shocked at the $8 price tag for something that feels just like an old free mobile game, but without ads. The gameplay is simple and fun for the first hour, but you soon realize that you're asked to do the same thing over and over again in about 10 different maps with slightly increasing difficulty. The only thing that seems to change is the upgrades of the powerups, which do not seem to matter as much as you would think. However the main reason I am giving this a negative review is because of some fundamentally flawed game design decisions that simply make this game tiring.
Here are some examples:
- The orb selected to be thrown will change color whenever any color stops having any presence on the level even when the orb you are holding is not that color. For example, you could be holding blue, ready to launch it at an appropriate position, but a chain reaction in another part of the level caused all greens to disappear and without warning your orb could change to red while you are shooting it, causing you to mess up.
- Powerups are not as helpful as they seem. In many of the "harder" levels, with twisting paths and multiple pushers, it can easily become impossible for you to pick them up and will sometimes even move to an impossible to reach position on their own. They also take a random amount of time to finish (fireflies, meteor strike, etc.), meaning that a player might be forced into doing an incorrect move thinking that the powerup was done.
- Orb placement has proved to be a bit inconsistent. While shooting two orbs in succession from the exact same position, they ended up being placed in different locations.
- There is no penalty for throwing away orbs.
- The speed at which the orbs move is quite varying and hard to predict.
Review posted on 09/12/2019, 13:44:00.