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Smoothie Swipe - A matching game where you link up tiles, rather than switching them; and longer chains are worth more points. (One of the Imaginary Range minigames used the same mechanic.) The setup is similar to many of this style of games: The world map leads you through a series of puzzles; you need to pay for power-ups and you have limited lives that refresh over time; and success at later stages is often dependent on the whim of the Random Number God. They switch off levels where you have a limited number of moves and a limited time, and the win conditions change up, which all adds some nice variety. (And you can grind the coins you use to buy power-ups by replaying earlier levels, which means that I feel I can actually use the power ups!) There are a gazillion levels, but you need to either wait or tag Facebook friends to unlock the later areas.
Jewel Fight - Clearly a Puzzle Quest knockoff that isn’t quite as good—mostly because there really aren’t any useful tutorials, so I have a hard time figuring out real strategy beyond “match this color, not that one—but it still functions as an excuse to play a zillion games of Bejeweled. The “wait or pay” trick in this is that your character’s health regenerates in real time, and health potions are rare / cost real money. So rather than running out of lives, you need to stop playing long enough to recover your hit points so you can survive the next fight. There is arguably a plot, but it’s nothing of real note.
Smove - A simple little game with an interesting aesthetic: You have a white dot on a grid. Move around the grid, collect colored squares, and don’t get hit by the black dots that fly by. Cute concept, but not much to get or keep you hooked.
KooZac - Apparently their server was down the first time I tried this, as I couldn’t get into the game at all. It continued to be down for a full week, so I have nothing to say about a game I couldn’t actually try.
Walkabout Journies - A curious little escort-mission game with a creepy-adorable Tim Burton aesthetic. The gimmick is that you’re trying to maneuver your “walkabouts” through an auto-scrolling maze by rotating the screen around them, so that they fall in the right direction at the right time. You succeed by snagging the stars and getting the walkabouts to the exit door, “wherever here is”. It’s cute.
Jewel Fight - Clearly a Puzzle Quest knockoff that isn’t quite as good—mostly because there really aren’t any useful tutorials, so I have a hard time figuring out real strategy beyond “match this color, not that one—but it still functions as an excuse to play a zillion games of Bejeweled. The “wait or pay” trick in this is that your character’s health regenerates in real time, and health potions are rare / cost real money. So rather than running out of lives, you need to stop playing long enough to recover your hit points so you can survive the next fight. There is arguably a plot, but it’s nothing of real note.
Smove - A simple little game with an interesting aesthetic: You have a white dot on a grid. Move around the grid, collect colored squares, and don’t get hit by the black dots that fly by. Cute concept, but not much to get or keep you hooked.
KooZac - Apparently their server was down the first time I tried this, as I couldn’t get into the game at all. It continued to be down for a full week, so I have nothing to say about a game I couldn’t actually try.
Walkabout Journies - A curious little escort-mission game with a creepy-adorable Tim Burton aesthetic. The gimmick is that you’re trying to maneuver your “walkabouts” through an auto-scrolling maze by rotating the screen around them, so that they fall in the right direction at the right time. You succeed by snagging the stars and getting the walkabouts to the exit door, “wherever here is”. It’s cute.
