Saturday Casual Gaming 310: Merge Magic

In Which Gram Games Has Done It Again

Once Upon a Time, I played a mobile game called Merge Dragons, and it was good. It got overwhelming at a certain point, and some of the challenges seemed literally impossible, but I enjoyed it when I played it.

Then I discovered Gram Games' other merge/match-3 game: Merge Magic.

What a pretty loading screen...

So Merge Magic is basically identical to Merge Dragons, but with an emphasis on other mythical beasts, rather than solely focusing on dragons. So it's literally the same game with a paint job.

Except...

I'm having more fun playing it, it's more challenging yet much more fairly balanced, and a lot of the creatures are cuter than the dragons were.

So I'm having a blast. I've got magic llamas, magic squirrels, fairies, and more - all digging up rocks and throwing money at me and it's great.

And the holiday events! If I devoted an entire weekend to them, like they seem to expect, I might actually be able to beat one, one of these tries, but they're impossible for a casual player to defeat unaided by real money. Then again, half the fun is seeing how many event points you can rack up before the event ends, so that's still really fun!

And it's actually pretty easy to get the home garden cleared in good time, too!

So basically, if you liked Merge Dragons, you'll probably like Merge Magic. Keep an eye out for secret levels on the level select screen, match away to your heart's content, and just... earn all of the stars. Earn them all. Every last one. You never know when one will turn out to contain gems (the premium currency)!

It's available in the app store, if you were wondering.

That'll about do it for me today - I know, short and sweet...

Go Enjoy Something!
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Saturday Casual Gaming 246: Pocket Forest

In Which I Slide and Match Three

I like me some mobile games - especially when they're free! Pocket Forest is an offering from developer Battle Mango and available on the Google Play Store.

But it's far more complicated than it first appears!

Pocket Forest has a lot going for it. It's a match-3 game, which I love, but it's also a sliding tiles game, which means that in order to match three of the same image (dirt, grass, water; fox, tree, droplet, and up), you have to slide rows and columns until images match up. Oh, and you have limited moves with which to slide! Thankfully, tapping the groups of three or more doesn't take a move from your pool.

Now, as if that wasn't enough to keep track of just in the gameplay, tiles can interact! If you match 3 water tiles of the same level, they'll water the tiles around them! Dirt tiles will become grass tiles (which is annoying if you're trying to get more animal tiles!), tree or plant tiles (but not grass tiles) bear fruit that will automatically be fed to any directly adjacent animals, netting you extra points! I have only played the first zone and haven't filled the Bestiary yet, and I'm already addicted.

Oh, I didn't mention the Bestiary?

Yeah, there's a Bestiary!

A fairly extensive Bestiary, too!

I'm pretty sure the above image is from an older build of the game, but! It shows basically what happens.

You play your level until you run out of moves (and by the way, tiles will auto-merge if they're next to each other at the end of a level, so you can use that to your advantage!), and at the top, you'll see three stars. Each star fills as you gain points, and they represent the potential rarity of animals you'll encounter as a reward. My first animal was a sweet little fox, and one of the cool aspects of this sticker-style collection is that you get to pet the animals.

Ever wanted to pet a brown bear?

Now you can! And without getting mauled, no less!

Now, you can only pet them once, sadly... until you find a duplicate! I have my little lizard 100% petted, and it gave me a bonus!

Actually, pretty much everything nets you bonuses in this game, so if you're having a hard time in real life and you just need a win, however, small, you can almost certainly squeak one out while playing this game for less than 10 minutes. Bonuses are usually buffs for in-game (like a button which places animals on all dirt tiles available, a button to water every tile at once, and a button to plant one tree anywhere on a grassy tile), but sometimes you'll get tickets!

There are two types of tickets - normal tickets and golden tickets! I haven't had much luck with the one Golden Ticket I got - it just gave me more boosters (and once you hit 50+ of the same booster, getting more boosters is not that thrilling), but I know it can get you other things, like new skins for your tiles!

I actually wound up getting rewarded with a Cactus skin for my plants, so now my foxes eat cactus fruits when it rains! I got that as a level bonus for collecting a certain amount of animals :)

Battle Mango did a great job on this game, and it's cute and fun, so if you're looking for a feel-good game, definitely check out Pocket Forest!

Go Enjoy Something!
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Saturday Casual Gaming 233: Pride of Place

Pride of Place from Rubble Games

I explore a lot on Kongregate. It's lead me to a lot of really cool, fun games, like NGU Idle or Realm Grinder, and that's basically what happened with Pride of Place.

What a cool game!

This is a fun little game from Rubble Games out of Sheffield, UK. With a fun pixelly style and great bleeps and bloops mixed with cartoonish screams and grunts, as well as a fantastic score, this is a great game both visually and audibly, though you may want to turn the sound down a bit, as the bleeps and bloops may be a bit jarring for the unprepared.

The story of Pride of Place is basically this: you are a put-upon drone desperate to protect your intellectually lacking master as the two of you fly through space. Since you're flying exhausted and un-maintained, due to your master's inability to stop napping, you fly the spaceship right into an asteroid belt. Now, to be fair, humans need sleep, so I'm not going to give PoP Guy a lot of trouble over this. Especially when you consider how cool this all looks!

Is it showing my age if this is how I think games look when I think about games?

You crashland on a strange world and are almost immediately thrown into the combat system. It's a match-3 system, but you don't swipe or drag, you click the adjacent pieces you're swapping. That took me a hot minute to figure out and I got a littttttle frustrated there. I think that's more on me for trying to figure out simple gameplay elements at 4AM while struggling with acid reflux... Regardless, combat is automatic and pretty easy to grasp once you understand the "click to swap" thing.

And you are going to swap a lot as you play.

While you're swapping, sometimes you'll find different shapes (a gray rock, a gold rock, money, hearts, red diamonds, etc) - these are your resources, and you need them to buy upgrades. Do not skip out on resources - PoP Guy will shoot baddies automatically (albeit not as powerfully, I think?) while you gather resources. Once gathered, you take the resources back to Town and sell them to the various NPCs (who you have to rescue). Sell enough of each resource they ask for and you'll find they've made you weapons or armor or other upgrades! Then you buy the upgrades from them. Yeah. I don't really understand their economy either. I'm also reasonably certain that you are being taken advantage of by the NPCs.

I'm really enjoying my runs through Pride of Place, so if you're looking for a fun, odd RPG to play, and you like the idea of playing as basically Skeets from Booster Gold, this'll definitely be great for you, too!

Go Enjoy Something!
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