Saturday Casual Gaming

 

In Which I'm Gaming Again!!!

It's a hot and hazy summer's day, and I have not had the guts to go outside. My father has been burning our wood pile down slowly because it was starting to put off its own heat waves and we do not want it to spontaneously combust. My mother has been gardening. We entertained the idea of taking the cat to the beach for the first time, but she has been hiding in her blanket fort all day after she had a brief outing this morning.

Instead of being active (beyond my usual squats and self-soothing rocking lol), I've been starting an indoor garden!

Oh, not a real one. I have a black thumb, not a green one lol.

But as I may have mentioned on Tuesday, I have found itch.io and been able to start playing new games!

And today's title is "Plant Daddy" by Brady Soglin.

In this game, you're the eponymous Plant Daddy - a lonely college grad who has just moved into their first apartment with nothing and no one. You buy your first plant - a "garden plant" - and start caring for it. As your plant grows, it will give you Leaves, which are your first currency, and after it fully matures, it gives you Blossoms, which act as a second currency. As you gain these Leaves and Blossoms, you can spend them in the store tab for such niceties as places to sit (or set plants on), artificial lighting, and even room expansions. Mostly, though, you'll be using your currencies to buy new plants.

Sometimes, you'll get special traits on your plants like variegated leaves and fancy stem colors! You can get special pots for those plants with the Nursery item, and you can even develop seeds from them, so if you want an army of variegated Tiny Trees named David, you absolutely can. Yes, you can name your plants. I am naming all of mine.

You can also buy decorations and more places to set plants down, which the game strongly encourages you to do.

Yes, that's a plant next to a candle on top of a cardboard box, and yes its name is Dan.

Zoomed out to show that to-do list on the wall above the shelf
It's how you find your objectives!

How's Annie?

Anywho, this game is really fun! It's relaxing and quiet and cute and you can easily lose a few days just trying to work your way through your To-Do List and raise an exceptionally cool plant or three. Currently I'm about 50 blossoms away from unlocking the next room - the bathroom - where I can then proceed to grow mushrooms on the back of my purchasable toilet lol!

There doesn't seem to be any way to pay-to-win in this, either! No "pay 99 cents to speed up" or "buy x amount of currency for 3 bucks of real money" stuff that I'm used to from generator-based idle games like this. It's refreshing and pleasant and as long as you don't turn the sound effects up too much while watering, you're not going to have to go to the bathroom a bunch of times.

In short, this is a perfect game with a deceptively simple interface that leads to fabulously deep gameplay. It looks cute, the "story" is adorable and relatable even if you're a plant-killer like me, and sometimes it's nice to just look at a room full of potted plants named things like "Leroy" or "Chad" and think "yeah, this is exactly what I wanted this to look like". 

All in all, this is a game that is absolutely worth a playthrough!

So Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming - Two Eyes Nonogram

 

Hey Haven't Done One of These In A While!

Once upon a time, I had a new game on her every week. I'd play the game and then review it and I'd let you all know what I thought. Mobile games, PC games, even the occasional console game... I'd cover what I loved (or didn't) about a game every week.

Except I'd never finish the games. Well... except one or two.

I Finished Two Eyes - Nonogram.

This game is lovely and a perfect time-sink. Free to play from start to finish with an option to pay for zero ads (which, admittedly, could improve your experience), and with gorgeous art and lovely music, this game was well worth a download - especially since I love nonogram-style gameplay!

For those not in the know, a Nonogram game involves you filling in squares of a grid to make an image, guided only by some numbers. The games usually have a tutorial (sometimes unskippable) which teaches you how to use those numbers to figure out what you're drawing. They're also often story-based, where the pictures you're filling in are the illustrations. These tend towards the fairytale side of fiction, so if that's not your cup of tea, you may find yourself simply in it for the gameplay, which is still quite rewarding!

Two Eyes, which is published by GAMEFOX (I've played other games of theirs!) and is available on ios and android, tells the story of a wolf and a deer slowly coming to terms with the fact that they are reincarnations of a deeply loving couple. It's very Greek Tragedy and well-told, though you can kind of tell it's a translation (sometimes the sentence structures are a bit rigid and unnatural, for instance), but in the end, it's a sweet little story, and I was, as the kids say, there for it.

The art, as you can tell, is spectacular, but I will not spoil you for the pixel art aspect - that would be cheating, since the pixel art is the gameplay!

I will, however, tell you that the story is broken into which character you're following (Wolf puzzles or Deer puzzles), and every story is broken down further into chapters. There are story-advancing puzzles and non-story-advancing puzzles, and both are fun! The story-advancing puzzles are arranged in a large 36 puzzle grid and range from 10x10 to 30x30. After you complete one character's story, you can finish the other character's story to see it from their perspective (the titular Two Eyes), or you can skip to the bittersweet finale.

The finale is the hardest part to get through with a triad of brutal 6x6 grids of 30x30 puzzles to get through. Your reward, however, is seeing the end of this lovely little story of enduring love.

Now, I mentioned the ad-free purchase option earlier. In my opinion, having an ad after ever two or three puzzles is a very fair tradeoff. For me, these ads were always easy to exit out of after about five or ten seconds, and I only accidentally fatfingered them once or twice. It was not economical or necessary for me to pay the oh-so-steep (sarcasm there, friend) price of two whole American dollars for the luxury of not seeing ads for a local guy who fixes basements for a decent price. Definitely pay for the ad-free version if you find the ads obnoxious, though, because the money goes towards making a bunch of beautifully drawn nonogram games like this one!

I can strongly recommend Two Eyes Nonogram to anyone who loves casual, untimed puzzle games.

That's all from me today!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming: Leaf Blower Revolution

 

In Which I Play A Game About Leaves

If you know me, you know Fall is my favorite season. I didn't find this game until November, however, so you're getting a review of Leaf Blower Revolution - Idle Game by Humble North now. In January. Because I'm lazy and I've been playing a lot of Stardew Valley.

But yeah! Leaf Blower Revolution! Available on Steam! Free to play!

A simple, leafy game

I'm a lazy player. That's why I like idle games so much - you start it up and half pay attention to it. You don't need sound. You don't need it to be flashy. This game is a relaxing time-sink, and I've really enjoyed playing around with it.

You are a dude (or lady, or Santa...) who has a bunch of leaves on his lawn. You move your mouse/touchpad around to make the leaves go off screen and get points. You spend your points on things to move the leaves faster, including lil leaf Roombas which toodle around until they stop dead, recharge, then toodle off to move more leaves.

There are multiple menus of upgrades. There's multiple currencies. There's multiple kinds of upgrades. Do you want better skins for your tiny lil pixel person? Spend red coins (which you can earn several ways, but mostly through daily play and soft resets). Do you want a better leaf blower? Spend leaves. Do you want a change of scenery? There's a currency for that!

Basically, it's a very simple game with a lot of customization and such. I'm currently dressed as Santa and hunting down Void Leaves and Apples with my army of red-nosed Leaf Roombas and armed with a frickin Lazer. Life is pretty good.

There's no heavy clicking to be done - all of the effort is put in by just moving your cursor (which is your lil avatar dude) around. You only click on menu buttons. Which is actually a problem, because if I have one complaint it's that most of the menus with scroll bars are very hard to get to cooperate. Sometimes I'll try clicking the down arrow and nothing happens. Sometimes I try to drag the scroll bar and nothing happens. Sometimes neither approach works for a few minutes.

Admittedly, this could just be a problem with my computer - my laptop is getting pretty old and I'm resisting an upgrade because I hate that new laptops don't have any dvd/cd tray :|

What can I say, I'm an internet oldie.

And yes, this game is 100% free on Steam, though you can give the developers money for DLC packs. If you really love simple games about shuffling leaves back into the forest from whence they came in all their 8-bit glory, then by all means, financially support the devs!

If you want to download this game from Steam, it's here. I'd recommend it :)

That will do it for me today!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 311: Terrarium Garden Idle

In Which I Grow Plants

I will be honest: I have a brown thumb. I do not grow things well. I want to have plants, but I've actually killed fake plants before (you pick em up the wrong way and suddenly the inside wire snaps and you have a very crummy plantlike object).

Now I can have nice, healthy plants in my pocket without having to worry about them being dead!

Because they were never alive to begin with.

They're pixels.

Green Panda Games made a game for mobile called Terrarium Garden Idle, and it's pretty darn fun!

It's also a very attractive game!

So you start out with some weird greenish orbs and buy yourself a lil plant. Then you just tap the crap out of it to get more green orbs. Eventually you level up. The more you tap and level up, the more plants you can unlock. Every 20 levels or so, you can open a new shelf to give yourself room for your obsessive plant habit.

And once you run out of space/make enough orbs, you can literally jump to a new world.

There's a lot of plants.

This is a great little time-waster app, and despite Green Panda's affiliation with Ubisoft (gag), this game is somehow not pay-to-win. Yeah, you can buy pink diamonds for special stuff, but if you're like me and you don't care how fast this goes, you can just... chill. Yeah, you can watch ads for powerups, yeah you can buy them with green orbs, but I've never needed them.

Then again, I'm not a high enough level where the wait time for a plant to grow becomes an issue.

So yeah, this is a fun game on the app store, and you should probably go play it if you need something to do at, say, the DMV or something.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 305: Defender Idle: New Beginning

In Which I Actually Enjoy A Tower Defense Game

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a naturally high-stress person. I know, I tout myself as being chill, but the fact is, I'm an inert ball of anxiety 90% of the time - physically chill, mentally freaking out. I don't usually like games where it's possible to lose. I don't like my characters dying. I don't like losing progress. I hate screwing up and not being able to fix things. Life doesn't have an "Undo" button, but video games (newsflash) aren't real life, and I'm not looking for them to be.

So I usually hate Tower Defense games, because you go on for a bit, then it's game over because you didn't put your points into whatever arbitrary loadout the level wanted from you. And you take a penalty. Because you didn't know the first time you played what it was the game was looking for. Ugh.

Don't like that at all.

But that's where Idle Games creep in. See, in an Idle Tower Defense game? The goal is to die. You're not punished for dying. Dying is how you learn. Dying is how you progress.

And Defender Idle: New Beginning, from Barbasu, is a great example of how to make an engaging Idle Tower Defense Game.

This game has only existed since the end of December, 2019, so it's a little over a month old now, and I have to say - having started to play it over two weeks ago, I'm nowhere near even the mid-game. It's a very long game - especially if you're bad at paying attention like I am.

See, this game isn't gonna hold your hand from start to finish, but it also doesn't punish you. If you're confused, click around for a bit - you'll figure it out. That's good game design, folks. I like that.

Your goal is to beat various waves of enemies in several game modes while building up your base. Simple enough, right? Right! There's no twist. There's no surprises. You just. play. the game.

I'm still early enough in the gameplay that I have no idea what half of the currencies are used for, I've barely leveled up my base, and I only have three kinds of turrets, but I still feel like I'm having fun. I rarely ever devote this much time to a game where I make so little apparent progress. The secret, my friends, is that you're never actually stuck. Bored? Surrender. Take a lower prize than you would if you played to the inevitable outcome of your enemies overwhelming you, and go level up some random stuff in your base. I've literally only surrendered once, and that was because I'd put some turrets in the wrong place and completely missed that you can sell turrets because I have the eyesight of a very myopic newt.

DI:NB is not a graphics-intensive game. It has a comfortably nostalgic Atari-vibe to it (some of the enemies vaguely resemble the spaceship from the OG Galaga, for instance), but it has its own flavor. I like that the colors, while bright, aren't obnoxious, they mostly make sense - green buttons can be clicked, red ones are locked, and yellow ones are close to being unlocked (except in the Masonry building - why are the purchasable upgrades red, but the maxed-out ones yellow? That makes no sense...)

Yes, keeping track of no less than 11 different currencies/substances can be confusing, but thankfully, there's not any real crossover. You'll always use gold for tower-defense upgrades, you'll always use RP (Rebirth Points) for percentage-based upgrades (like what % of a chance you have to find a specific substance/currency when killing enemies, boost your health by x%, etc), and you'll always use "Esoteric Substance" (lol nice name) to boost your Masonry projects.

Music and gun sounds are fun, with some chiptune aspects as well as some more modern effects. It's fairly repetitive, but it's also exactly what you want from a game like DI:NB. The gun sounds are fairly standard crunchy lasergun sounds not a pewpew, but also not a bangbang, more like small, satisfying explosions.

Overall, I'd have to say that Barbasu has a real winner on their hands with DI:NB, and if you want to check it out on Kongregate, you should. The developer has indicated that the game is now in its final form, barring any unforseen bugs. My only suggestion is that you keep it opened in a separate window, rather than a separate tag, as it doesn't always run very well when you aren't actively watching it, and it doesn't seem to do much while your computer is in standby or sleep mode. If that's not the purpose of the design, then it's a bit annoying. If it is the purpose, then well played - you're demanding attention for your game.

So yeah, go play this game!

And Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 251: Starlight XMas

In Which I Play A Very Sweet Game

Back in the earliest days of my being an internet gamer, I discovered a little studio called Armor Games. Of course, within a year, Armor Games became a massive publisher, but back when I first encountered them, they had a few lil Flash games under their belt and hadn't yet seen massive success. Through Armor Games, I found a lot of RPGs and weird action puzzlers that I loved, but then Christmas rolled around, and I found Starlight Xmas.

A fun, clever puzzle game by Zedarus on Kongregate

The goal of the Starlight series is to use your mouse to guide a field of stars into position. You're rotating a 3D field until you form a constellation, at which point you have beaten the level! This mechanic is so clever it's no wonder that there's at least two main games at this point, and to top it all off, the music is gorgeous (if a bit loud at times).

It's perhaps a one-trick pony, but when your trick is this cool, you don't really need more.

This is not a game for the adrenaline junkie. It's not intense in any way shape or form. It's peaceful. It's tranquil. It's occasionally frustrating as you search for just the right position to make the reindeer appear... In short, this is a borderline Grandma Game, and I love it even more for it. With its simple, elegant art style and its easy-to-learn-lifetime-to-master gameplay, it's the perfect thing to curl up with a cup of cocoa and play through.

If you're looking for a sweet, simple game to put you in a holiday mood, why not give it a look-see? I mean, you're probably gonna need to activate Flash or install a substitute in order to play it, but it's so great that I'm down with that. It's one of those games where I replay it every year to see if I can beat my old high scores, and every year, I remember why I love it.

Happy Holidays,
Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 248: Nonogram Wish Stone

In Which I Play A Story-Heavy Puzzle Game!

The mobile game Wish Stone Nonogram from GameFox is a free-to-play puzzle game where you fill in images based on a set of numbers along a grid. I've covered a Nonogram style game before in Nonograms Katana, but this game is quite different in that it has two modes: Story and Free Play. I have only played the Story Mode, so far, but I understand that the Free Play mode gets quite massive...

Yes, that's a city on the back of a flying whale.
Yes, that's important.

Throughout the Story Mode, there are four major parts, each represented by a different character: A King, A Princess, An Adventurer, and what looks to be An Archaeologist. Each character advances the story along via several 5x5 boards of puzzles (25 puzzles per chapter). I believe there are nine or ten chapters per size of each game (10x10, 15x15, 20x20), and each is incredibly detailed. You're literally building the chapter's image with each puzzle solved!

It would seem that this version of the game had not yet introduced the Archaeologist character I have on mine!
You make the image on the right out of different puzzles you solve. This is the King's first chapter rendered in 10x10 tiles!

The story so far has been a tragedy. I'm nearly at the end of the Princess's part of the story and things have gone horribly wrong. It's a standard Monkey's Paw-style plot, but with a great deal of pathos and madness and love and loss and it's really quite engrossing! Who knew the reader would love a game where you get to read a short story after playing a bunch of fun levels?

Speaking of the levels...

So you start the game with 10 hints. I've only used one and that was absolutely by mistake. You have 10 errors you can make per level, after which you start the level over. Errors are marked with a red X, and you can fill in empty spaces with gray X marks. Interestingly enough, you can place X's in error with impunity. Gray X's also appear, filling in gaps, when you place all of the tiles correctly in a row or column. As you can see from the example above (somewhat), the game is pretty simple. Where you see a black number, that's how many filled-in tiles there are in a row or column. Multiple numbers mean that there are spaces between runs of filled-in tiles. In a 10x10 puzzle, you'll usually be thrilled to see 10s or 9s because they're usually pretty easy to fill in. Especially 10s, which you literally just fill all the way in.

You solve your puzzles and eventually get your next chapter or character, learning more of the story as you go, and it's lovely.

The art is beautiful, the fantasy music that plays in the background is pleasant, and there is something addictive about playing these games! I have enjoyed every GameFox game I've downloaded, and while sometimes the ads, which appear between puzzles, can be annoying, I'm just glad that they get paid for their free game. So much effort goes into these interesting games that it would be awful if they didn't get paid.

Wish Stone is definitely a game I strongly recommend you download and play, if you have some time to sink into a story-driven puzzle game, like fantasy, and your fingers aren't too large. If you have sausage fingers, however, you're going to want to invest in a fine-tipped stylus or something, because 25x25 and 30x30 puzzles are brutal on the ol' fingertips...

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 244: Dwarven Miner

In Which I Diggy Diggy Hole

I quite enjoy simple games. You know what they say: Simple pleasures for simple minds. I love it when I don't have to keep a massive amount of button combinations or complicated directions. Dwarven Miner by voidinfinity is just about perfect for someone who has had some insomnia issues and needs something simple rather than something complex.

Look how simple even the main page is!

So basically, this game has one goal: Make the moolah.

You are a dwarf, and you're digging a hole. A really giant hole. A massive money hole.

Yes, I literally just wrote about this game to reference the song.

Basically, there are five buttons, but four of them are the directional arrows on your keyboard, so don't get intimidated. The only other button is the space bar. You do not use your mouse for anything.

And that's a very simple story, isn't it?

You start with a crummy little pick that can only dig up the light tan squares, you have to have wood in order to safely mine (one piece of wood per square), and sometimes you'll dig up ore or artifacts! I've had very bad luck with artifacts, however.

Behold - ore!

Once you have your inventory full, you have to wander around the surface, looking for a tiny hut-shaped shop to sell your stuff at. Once you sell it, you can save your game, buy more wood (strongly recommended) or new picks. You can even generate a whole new world to dig up!

And that's it.

That's the whole game, as far as I can tell.

Diggy diggy hole.

Sell your stuff.

Buy wood and/or new picks.

Diggy diggy hole.

It's perfect for wasting time or for when you need to zone out. I've even fallen asleep while playing it a few times!

If you're looking for a video game to enjoy without sinking your whole consciousness into it, definitely give Dwarven Miner a try on Kongregate or anywhere else you can find it!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 235: Elephant Quest

Elephant Quest
From Armor Games, Jimp, and jmtb02
on Kongregate

Every so often, I like to go back to certain games after I've beaten them. I mean, me beating a game is a rare enough occurrence in and of itself that it's pretty noteworthy, but sometimes a game is good enough to return to. Elephant Quest is one such game.

This game is older than you'd think. Armor Games was pretty small when this game appeared on Kongregate, and I have many happy memories of getting stuck in that one block on level 8, blasting my way through Nudgers, and reveling in the fact that there was so much blue in this game! Seriously, it's old enough that blue was not back in vogue at the time. It was still in the barren wasteland of brown and gray.

Seriously, it's really blue. I love it.

Sadly, if you click on the merchant button, they no longer have gear through Armor Games, but the game is still available both there and on Kongregate!

Anyway, what is the story for this little platformer?

You are Elephant the Elephant (yes, that's seriously your name).

You are a dapper little pachyderm.

You're hanging out with the other elephants, who aren't named Elephant by the way (some are named Bob, Bobert, and Bobbington...), when the local ruffian, a bully named Woolly, shows up and decides what's his is his, but what's yours is his too. He ganks your bowler and books it.

Elephant is, understandably, heartbroken over this.

The rest of this game is your quest to regain your hat and beat down that mammoth! Sounds simple, right?

Well, it's kinda harder than it sounds. You're dropped, sans any instruction, into this screen, which has an adorable Yoshi's Crafted World-esque backdrop that I love.

What do? Well, you move with the arrow keys, apparently...

After clicking around (which activates the laser cannon on your back - yes you have a laser cannon, you really liked that hat), I eventually realized that the arrow keys move, so I approached the shiny yellow elephant. His name is Sprouts. A prompt to press the "down" arrow popped up, so I did so.

This activates a dialogue with Sprouts, who tells you what you've already figured out...
you use arrow keys to move, mouse to attack. Up key jumps. Down key interacts.

Sprouts is your first indication that this game is a bit silly. Okay, the fact that you're an elephant named Elephant toting laser cannons and going after a kleptomaniac woolly mammoth named Woolly might have been your first clue, but the fact remains, there are no serious moments in this game. Nothing is dour or dark or bitter. I mean, Elephant's pretty bitter about his bowler, but he's not going full Batman or anything.

The rest of the game is spent doing fetch-quests for other elephants, like hunting balloons for the Bob brothers (Bob, Bobert, and Bobbington), finding lost teddy bears or umbrellas, etc, while you hunt down Woolly. While you're doing these quests, literally everything in this world tries to kill you. Creatures, spikes, endless pits... the world hates elephants. Luckily, you've got a laser cannon or six to help you out, and the more you level up or complete quests, the more firepower and health you gain!

But how do you level up?

You shoot everything that's not an elephant. Seriously. Every moving thing wants you dead, so kill it first.

One of my favorite rooms is this one. I call it the Kill Pit.
You just sit up on the slope and shoot everything to death down there.
You also get the Yellow Key, which you'll need.

When you level up, the box with your level number will glow. You click on it and it takes you to the skill tree. Which is more of a skill jungle. Seriously, there's, like, a million little things to click on. The skill tree takes Credits (which you get about two of with every level), and when you spend them, you might get skill points (if you land on an orange, purple, green, or blue node) or health (red nodes). There are yellow nodes that give you a random node color, too, but they're pretty uncommon. Then, you take all of the skill points you just got from your nodes and head down to the teal part of the menu you're on.

This section is fairly self explanatory...

So you've got your points, you spend them on one of three different sub-skills per skill path. When you hit 25 points in a single section, you get a bonus. Acrobatics improves your jump height, Weapon Targeting gives you better aim with less jitter, Weapons makes your lasers hurt more, and the Miniphant Swarm gives you laser-shooting flying pygmy elephants who swarm around you and murder your foes. I like to max out the Swarm as quickly as possible.

You can also improve your damage resistance, health, how many credits you get per levelup, resistance to spike damage specifically, how fast you move, how quickly you regenerate health, how much XP you gain from quests, and "how cute you look".

The lavender bar on the menu takes you to the Level Map, which is... kinda simple. It's basically screenshots of the different levels with lines connecting the doors to each other. It's useful if you get lost, which you probably will, because the game is bigger than you'd expect from a Flash game from 2011.

The orange bar keeps track of your Quests, which will help you when you get confused about who needs what where and how you need to get it.

Then you've got the goldenrod bar at the bottom that takes you back to the game.

You can die in this game, by the way. If you get swarmed by Nudgers or something, they can absolutely kill you. Thankfully, I have yet to encounter a game-over screen in eight years of play. You just instantly respawn. This can be an issue if the flying enemies swarm you in the center of the level and you have to creep your way back to the door so you can leave, but aside from that, it's really useful.

Yes, you respawn where you fall. Yes, that can be very annoying.

But nothing makes the game bad. I had to restart once because there's a bug in Zone 8 where you can jump into a specific block and get trapped (though sometimes sufficient wiggling can release you), but even that was quaint and funny!

If you're absolute trash at platformers, love elephants, and want to shoot some weird slime birds with lasers, definitely give Elephant Quest a try!


Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 230: Merge City

Sphere Games Studios made this merging game!

So, you might have noticed that I'm really getting into these merging games - you take two of the same item, you drag one on top of the other, bam, new item. Do this until you win. Or get bored. Or both. I like the monotony, believe it or not. Monotony is my jam.

So are neon colors and building things, so this Sphere Game Studios offering on Android is absolutely tailor-made for me.

You start off with a limited amount of space.

In the early game, you have just the nine spaces in the center, but as you level up (by merging more and more buildings together) you don't just gain new styles of building, you also earn more spaces in your city! There looks like there's a lot going on here, but don't worry, it's not as complex as you might think.

The double arrow button is just a cash shop where you can spend real money to gain some in-game bonuses. I'm not a cash-shop person, but if you feel a burning desire to support Sphere Games Studio, that's certainly a fast way to do so!

The medal button leads to your Achievements - these will earn you more coins as you go along, so keep an eye out and tap it when it throws up a little red bubble with a white exclamation point - that means you have a new Achievement to check!

The last button on the left is the x2 button. This is... pretty self-explanatory - it's a way of doubling income from your houses by watching an ad.

On the upper left are your gear button - a way to check out in-game options like volume (though I haven't heard any music?) notifications, language, etc - and your bar-graph button - which is the leaderboard. I'm in more than 4000th place...

On the upper right, there's a game pad button. This enables a mini-game where you try to stack blocks all the way to the top of the screen without them collapsing. I suck at this game, and it was impossible for me to play it and take a screenshot, so... sorry about that.

On the bottom right, there are three buttons (eventually). On the top, you'll have a globe button, which will take you to a new city or "world" when you reach a high enough level. Below that is a standard shop button, which you can access to buy buildings from with your coins!

Below that is a little house with a number - this is a quick-buy for a house. I haven't had much use for it, but it's cool to see the box color be yellow instead of the red, blue, or purple boxes I'm used to.

Speaking of boxes...

As usually happens in games like this, you have boxes which your buildings come in. The red boxes are your normal buildings - the lowest level ones you can get, usually. The blue boxes are higher-level buildings that appear randomly as a bonus as you play. Purple boxes are bonus coins! All of these boxes are free and can either be tapped into existence on the center bottom box button, or they'll time into being on their own, slowly filling your board!

Eventually, you'll get enough levels to gain another city/world.

One of the chief complaints I've seen on this game is that it's just what it says - a merging game. I don't really see how that's a bad thing. Yes, these games can get tedious. Yes, they can be hard to manage over time. No, I don't mind - that's half the fun!

So if the only real complaint I've seen is that the game is honest about its nature, that's not so bad, eh?

One last note: on occasion, you'll see a paper airplane gliding over the city. This is another ad opportunity where you can get bonuses by clicking on it. Otherwise, I haven't been bombarded by ads at all!

Overall, I'd say that Merge City is a really pleasant, simple game with some stunning visuals. I love the eternal sunset background on these floating cities, and the gameplay is fun while not being too taxing. It's a perfect bus-ride game!

That'll do it for me today, guys!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC