Cascading gems are back in Jewelanche 2, a beautiful match-3 game from FlashRush Games. Terrible monsters have invaded the land and turned everyone into jewels. It can be rough owning that magic amulet as it means you must be the one to break the curse! Draw lines across at least three adjacent gems of the same shape and color to make them to disappear. To pass a level, you need to fill up the progress bar on the right side of the screen before the gems fill the screen, or before the time runs out, depending on the level. This time around there are 50 themed levels, with a boss to defeat every ten levels.
If you match quickly enough, the bomb meter will fill up and drop a bomb gem. These explode when matched and are a great way to create some space on the board. You earn gold for each level played, which is spent in the shop on a few upgrades or a wide variety of single use power-ups. Some levels test your speed matching, while others let you take your time to plan your moves. There are also various challenges to overcome, such as stone or ice blocks. This added variety, plus the many different power-ups you can purchase from the shop, combine to keep the gameplay fresh. With brilliantly colored jewels and quirky bosses, Jewelanche 2 is a match-3 game done right.
Pretty good game, the levels fly by. 95% chance of positive effects from Pandora's box my hindquarters, though.
Seems like a cool game, but really hard with a touch pad--the controls are really sticky, making the timed levels nearly impossible. Too bad! Up to that point I was enjoying it!
Can someone tell me what those jewelbomb upgrades do? I've got it maxed out, and I rarely get explosions in more than two directions.
Using the golden watch to get more time with the mage glove seems incredibly effective.
Nice idea, and I like the physics. The click-detection leaves something to be desired, as I sometimes have trouble getting moves to register (with a mouse) and it hurts on the timed levels. The nearness could be just a smidge larger, too; on some of the later levels I find myself hunting for a single move, because the gems are juuuuuuust too far apart. But those are small quibbles in the overall scheme of things.
My large quibble is the puzzle levels, which drop ~8 gems at a time, for every move. There is no way to average 8 gems per match consistently, so you are basically forced to rely on bombs and power-ups. I personally dislike games where levels are unwinnable without powerups.
@Bill -- After you have the upgrade, the bombs increase as you add more to the field. The first that drops will be a 2-direction, the next a 3, and so on.
Now can anyone tell me the criteria for attacking the bosses? Sometimes a match generates an attack beam and sometimes it doesn't, and for the life of me I can't figure out a pattern. I've looked at jewel color, length of chain, direction of match, nearness of boss, and I just can't figure it out.
I think it varies with the boss. Is there a particular one you are wondering about?
@songsmith23: Thanks. In return, here's what I think I've figured out about the boss fights.
Forest boss: It looks like a beam will shoot from the last gem selected in any match.
Water boss: It looks like a beam will fire from the last gem selected in a match if the clam is close enough.
Stone Boss: It looks like a beam will shoot straight down from the last gem selected in any match, but only if there's a target directly below it.
Fire Boss: It looks like a beam will shoot from any starred gem in a match.
Ice Boss: It looks like a beam will shoot if the ice serpent is extended when the match is finalized.
OK, finished it. Good game overall, and it lived up to the promise of being addicting. The gold you earn is badly balanced enough to allow for getting rid of it altogether: by the time you actually need to spend it - around level 25 I think - you'll have more than you can ever hope to spend; I finished with about 70K unspent. The ice levels got annoying very fast, but since there's only 10 and it's the last 10 at that, it wasn't annoying enough to stop playing for.
4/5 for me.
I loved it up to the ice levels. I did run out of gold, and had to get more by playing earlier boss levels a few times. I finally realized I wasn't having fun any more.
I had the same complain as songsmith23 about it dropping 8 jewels for every move on the puzzle levels.
I never quite figured out when I got to keep my powerups and when I didn't. Most of the time, when I replayed a level, I got my powerups back. But a few times I lost one or two. And when I went into the shop after losing a level, sometimes I lost all my powerups and sometimes I didn't.
+1 to LuckyDee about the 95% luckiness on the Pandora's box. I think my lucky rate was around 10-20%. I was wondering if I should have stopped upgrading the luckiness dwarf before I got to the really old one who looked too tired to care.
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