![]() ![]() Featuring a charming cast of safety-minded bomb enthusiasts, Bomb Club has you make your way through a huge map of puzzle levels, all based around the art of setting off bombs. Everyone else: you shouldn’t miss this game.Do you like great writing, colorful characters, challenging puzzles, and explosions? Then Bomb Club is just the game for you. If you loathe match-3s or have something against pixel art, look away. It could certainly be more original and there are a few kinks to work out yet, but on the whole it’s a great experience. Pixel Defenders Puzzle steps beyond that by taking something from a game that was already an excellent evolution of the genre and moving it forward to another, even-more satisfying level. There’s always been something satisfying about match-3 mechanics, but after enough years playing them over and over they’re bound to start feeling stale. It’s a high level of strategy for a match-three, and it will really make you think. If so, you have to decide which units will take the shot and how best to use your action points. Then you need to evaluate whether the enemy is becoming a risk. First you need to decide where to place the next block, planning ahead so that you can upgrade tier after tier. In puzzle mode, the fun is in the choices-and there are a lot of them to make. It’s also a touch pointless currently, since the leaderboards are only local. It’s fun, but it’s not the most stimulating way to play. This strips out the enemies, making it much more similar to the Triple Town experience. On top of a ton of levels, Pixel Defenders Puzzle also carries an endless mode. There’s currently no limit to how many of these power-ups you can use in a given game, but a fix for this little problem is apparently in the works. You can also buy these in packs, which is a nice safety net to have. If you do well enough at protecting the target, finishing all the enemy waves in the fewest turns, and upgrading your units, you’ll be awarded extra bonus items like wild cards or obstacles that you can pull out in a pinch. It’s a matter of careful planning in an inherently random situation, a task that’s usually fun and occasionally horrifying. If you focus too intently on attacking the enemy, you may run dry before you take anyone out. You can only use as many abilities as you have action points to spend. As you match, you earn points that fill up red bubbles on the bottom of the screen. There is one more element of the tactics of Pixel Defenders Puzzle to consider: action points. Matching three obstacles clears them and gives you a nice bonus, but they’re rarely what you’re hoping to have next in your queue. It could be a unit you can use for an upgrade. In this case it’s with the next piece that spawns. It wouldn’t be a match-3 without an element of luck, of course. You will regularly find yourself needing to weigh your options: keep upgrading, with the hopes of getting somewhere useful before the next enemy attacks, or fight prematurely and lose badly-needed units. Each unit has a limited number of shots, and once they run out they leave the board. Each tier of each color has a unique ability, and those abilities damage enemies or apply status effects. That number is displayed right next to them, so it should be easy to keep on top of it, right? Enemies gather at the top of the screen, and they only attack after a number of turns pass. Defending them doesn’t have to be complicated, though. These targets have HP bars, and if they run out of health you’re done. Moving around the cramped playing space is a VIP target that needs protecting, or perhaps more than one. Each is defined by its own color, and there is no upgrade path that lets units of different colors get together. Each of Pixel Defenders Puzzle’s levels gives you a selection of armies to deal with-maybe one, maybe more. You’re not dealing with just one upgrade path and a pile of angry bears, though. You’ll need to watch for corners and edges rendered unreachable, combos that can’t be completed, and obstacles that can’t be dealt with. It’s what you do with it next that makes things interesting.Īs with Triple Town, you’ll run into all sorts of problems with the tight board. Familiar, but you’re not upgrading little trees and houses, you’re upgrading an army. Then you match that with two more like it, and it bumps up another level. Not like “oh my goodness this is the next Yeti Town " more like “now that’s a clever way to use those mechanics." If you match three units, they upgrade to the next tier of unit. Nowadays I need a little something more with my matching, and Pixel Defenders Puzzle ($0.99) has plenty more to offer.įor starters, it plays a lot like Triple Town (Free) without that game’s aggressive turn limits. This was around the same time I had, no joke, a Palm Pilot so I could play Bejeweled with a stylus in class. There was a time I was content to simply match three. ![]()
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