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Adventure Town - A few years ago, I played a swath of the Pocket Gems “Park” games (blame OblvnDrgn), which all have basically the same “build buildings, collect loot, upgrade your mons, wait four hours for everything to refresh” play cycle. This is totally the same thing, just based a little more in classic fantasy rpg style. The mons are heroes you can send to fight monsters and clear dungeons, the buildings are farms, inns, sawmills, bakeries and blacksmiths. You play for five minutes at a time, harvesting everything that’s refreshed and setting up new orders, then you ignore it for a few hours while it cycles. You are given Quests (which cycle with the game as you gain levels), and Bounties (which are time-based and a new one appears every day or so). These can involve killing monsters, crafting certain items, upgrading your buildings, or growing certain crops. The level-gain aspect of this (you get XP for refreshing shops, killing monsters and completing quests) is actually an insidious trap, because it unlocks quests but also makes all of the monsters stronger, so you need to get more gold (which you can wait for or pay real money for, natch) to upgrade your heroes’ weapons and armor.
According to a FAQ I found online, the “best” way to play is to fill your board with fruit shops and pumpkin fields, minimize leveling, and max two weapons (one melee, one magic) for a single hero. I would argue that the best way to play is to do quests until you get bored, and/or until you get frustrated that the gems you need to unlock the last bunch of land expansions seem to be rare and random drops.
Don’t Tap the White Tile - A relatively straightforward arcade-style game, where a series of tiles flow past and you need to only press the black ones. If you get the rhythm down, you’ll notice that it actually plays songs. I didn’t find it particularly addictive, though, and was irritated by the constant “come back and play” push notifications.
Peggle Blast -Somewhere between Snood and Arkanoid, you have limited shots to break all of the pegs in each board’s pattern. There are, of course, power-up pegs and bonus point pegs, too. Different stages involve different challenges, including clearing the board, dropping trapped gems, and cracking eggs. The levels ramp up in difficulty after the first section of 15 (no big surprise—you buy the power-ups for real money) and if you fail too many times, you have to either buy more lives or take a time-out. (A la Bubble Witch Saga.) There appear to be 9 sets of 15 levels, but I got stuck for quite some time on Level 29, which is really luck-based and screams “pay for power-ups if you want to clear this.” That ain’t happening.
Gemcrafter: Puzzle Journey - A variant on the match-3 concept, but you can slide the gems around the board and they “upgrade” to the next level as you match them. A clogged board is your biggest enemy. You effectively have to succeed at every “challenge”, because that gets you the keys, that get you the gems, that count as “winning” the game. (5 gems in each of 6 areas, each of which requires 5 keys = 150 stages.) It also really wants you to connect to Facebook, but that’s not surprising.
Strategy-wise, I found that your first few moves (and also some dumb luck in the early gem placement) really matter. Getting chain reactions later will help, but if you don’t get the first dozen moves right on a higher-level board, it’ll be impossible to complete. I think, unlike some other games of this style, it is actually possible to beat high-level stages without paying real money for cheats/power-ups, but it requires a lot of strategic thinking and at least some luck.
Dungeon Madness - Sorta-kinda roguelike dungeon crawler, with kinda lousy pixel art and a slow-going (but apparently somewhat deep) upgrade system. Battles are essentially automated hit-fests. I think it’s just a little too slow for me, I dunno. It’s a numbers-go-up game where more numbers need to go up.
According to a FAQ I found online, the “best” way to play is to fill your board with fruit shops and pumpkin fields, minimize leveling, and max two weapons (one melee, one magic) for a single hero. I would argue that the best way to play is to do quests until you get bored, and/or until you get frustrated that the gems you need to unlock the last bunch of land expansions seem to be rare and random drops.
Don’t Tap the White Tile - A relatively straightforward arcade-style game, where a series of tiles flow past and you need to only press the black ones. If you get the rhythm down, you’ll notice that it actually plays songs. I didn’t find it particularly addictive, though, and was irritated by the constant “come back and play” push notifications.
Peggle Blast -Somewhere between Snood and Arkanoid, you have limited shots to break all of the pegs in each board’s pattern. There are, of course, power-up pegs and bonus point pegs, too. Different stages involve different challenges, including clearing the board, dropping trapped gems, and cracking eggs. The levels ramp up in difficulty after the first section of 15 (no big surprise—you buy the power-ups for real money) and if you fail too many times, you have to either buy more lives or take a time-out. (A la Bubble Witch Saga.) There appear to be 9 sets of 15 levels, but I got stuck for quite some time on Level 29, which is really luck-based and screams “pay for power-ups if you want to clear this.” That ain’t happening.
Gemcrafter: Puzzle Journey - A variant on the match-3 concept, but you can slide the gems around the board and they “upgrade” to the next level as you match them. A clogged board is your biggest enemy. You effectively have to succeed at every “challenge”, because that gets you the keys, that get you the gems, that count as “winning” the game. (5 gems in each of 6 areas, each of which requires 5 keys = 150 stages.) It also really wants you to connect to Facebook, but that’s not surprising.
Strategy-wise, I found that your first few moves (and also some dumb luck in the early gem placement) really matter. Getting chain reactions later will help, but if you don’t get the first dozen moves right on a higher-level board, it’ll be impossible to complete. I think, unlike some other games of this style, it is actually possible to beat high-level stages without paying real money for cheats/power-ups, but it requires a lot of strategic thinking and at least some luck.
Dungeon Madness - Sorta-kinda roguelike dungeon crawler, with kinda lousy pixel art and a slow-going (but apparently somewhat deep) upgrade system. Battles are essentially automated hit-fests. I think it’s just a little too slow for me, I dunno. It’s a numbers-go-up game where more numbers need to go up.
