Puzzle Defence, from Dibblez, is a charming mash-up of the SameGame play mechanic with RPG elements. It's not quite on the same level as Knightfall, but it gives you 20 levels of relaxed, undemanding gameplay, and the graphics are cute.
Scary, adorable monsters are attacking your castle, and the only way to defend yourself is to match them together, puzzle/strategy-style. Your goal is to defeat enough enemies to advance to the next level. To maneuver them together, you have to destroy blocks of landscape. Click on any group of three or more tiles to make them disappear, allowing more mountains, grassland, crops, gold, and creatures to fall in from the top. Once you have a group of two or more monsters, click on it to eliminate them.
If a bad guy reaches the bottom of the screen, it damages your castle and leaves. If a pile of gold reaches the bottom, it adds to your wealth, which you can spend between levels on upgrades.
On later levels, the monsters get stronger and tougher. They arrive in greater numbers, do more damage to your castle, and must form larger groups before they are vulnerable. This gradual evolution of threat and the light customization (I like the upgrade that converts crops to gold) gives Puzzle Defence a little strategic oomph, but really it's just a pleasant way to spend 20 or 30 minutes. The sound design passes the Crunch Thump Crunch Thump likability test, and I generally just want to hug the game and tousle its hair. I'd love to see a fleshed-out sequel.
Hmmm... Not so sure on this one. As is the case with most of these games, a lot is dependent on random chance, and especially given the fact that the "upgrade" mechanic is not well balanced with the relative scarcity of gold. Repairing damage to the castle is expensive enough to be basically pointless, where you'll be spending an entire round's earnings to repair 10, maybe 15 points of damage.
Vexorg, I disagree with the idea that gold is scarce. The trick is to
get a lot of bags right away, when the enemies are relatively harmless, not worrying about your health until it gets down in the 20s or so.
I ended up being able to buy the farm after the first level with enough left over to buy the smithy after the second level. Then, after shielding my entire castle, I focused on killing the enemies instead. Eventually, the levels get long enough that you can collect several bags per level even without even trying to, and I was able to restore the castle back to 100% health.
The levels with only one kind of enemy are pretty easy... focus on the blocks that are above current enemies, making new ones fall down towards them. If there is only one separating 2 enemies vertically, they will be together after they advance... use this to your advantage!
Is this game freezing for anyone else? I get it to play for a little while, but then it just stops. I've tried it in Firefox and Safari, and my Flash player is up-to-date.
I usually dislike Samegame games, but this is fun. :-)
This one was decent for a while until I got to the point that they were forcing me to kill off 200 enemies. It felt like they just wanted to pad out the time to make me keep playing. I understand the point was to make the enemies more dangerous because you would see a lot of them, but it just got boring. Plus I'm a little wore out of Match 3 games. This is a good idea, but too long levels make me not interested in playing it again. However, I DID sign up just to post my awesome high score ;)
Thanks for the review! I noticed a bunch of hits coming in from jayisgames, so I thought I'd have a look. Very nice :)
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