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Lily´s Epic Quest - A cute twist on the standard match-3 game, that you're trying to create tunnels so that Lily can climb down and retrieve treasure. The extra moves provided by glittering stones are the key to actually collecting all the treasures, though power-ups from large matches help too. I found the number of different treasures daunting (especially given that they seem to be randomly distributed) and found the system of slowly upgrading your pickax to be annoying and unnecessary.
Chateau Garden - Earn money via snood-like puzzles; build a garden with your winnings. The garden-building doesn’t even qualify as “simulation” as you’re just picking from three choices (at three different price points) for each item that is then automatically placed.
India Garden - This is exactly the same game as Chateau Garden, except the characters are Indian and they’re building a garden because of a curse, or in spite of a curse, or something. I didn’t much care.
Aztec Venture - A stereotypical white explorer comes to explore Aztec ruins and recover their treasures, and is guided by a local woman in a The Road to El Dorado costume. (“Only mildly racist.”) The real point is to drop colored blocks onto other colored blocks, matching them and hopefully setting off chain reactions. Every fifth level is a different sort of puzzle, rotating blocks or dropping marbles to open a door and retrieve a treasure. There are 105 levels, but I got tired of them before that.
Safari Venture - Clearly in the same vein as the above, this is another set of 105 block-dropping puzzles, though every fifth level is a standard match-3 puzzle instead. The theme is animals, there’s basically no story. I found this less offensive for that reason, but by the time I reached it, I was bored with the gameplay.
Jewel Venture wouldn't run on my mini-laptop, but worked fine on my gaming PC. It’s a standard match-3 Bejeweled clone, and the gimmick is there are ten modes (…though several of them are basically the same) and each stage has one level of each style. The time limits get punishingly harder as you progress through the levels, though nothing otherwise changes.
2 Planets Fire and Ice also wouldn't run on my mini-laptop, and in a lot of ways, is the same game as Jewel Venture, just with gems that are slightly harder to tell apart and power-ups that all look alike. (But for a “Bomber” level, only certain bombs count, despite all of the power-ups look like bombs. I’m also 90% certain that level was mis-programmed, as getting 25 bomb power-ups seems pretty insane for that sort of level.) The two planets are “with and without time limit;” the fire/ice thing seems to only be stylistic.
Galact Quest - This gets credit for having a plot, though it’s a stock sci-fi space adventure plot. The meat of the game is shooting gems up to match colors and get chains of removals…but you need to always hit them on an angle, and if you hit on the point it just breaks the gem, and you lose power-up energy. Which means you need to be precise but still fast, aiming with a wiggly mouse control. I’m not enthusiastic.
Ricky Raccoon - This was fairly standard match-3, in which there are half a dozen different puzzle styles, three of which appear when you’re grinding gold, and three of which appear in each of the five eight-level treasure hunt areas. Straightforward and repetitive, yes, but a decent variation of the genre with a definitive set of goals and ending. Also, the difficulty never goes to “absurd,” which can’t be said for some of the others in this pack.
Ricky Raccoon 2 - Adventures in Egypt - Similar to the two Garden games above, this is exactly the same as the first game, just with a slightly different framing story. Grind gold, unlock treasure maps, complete the levels within to find a treasure, repeat for each of the five treasures. Another three hours of excuse to play match-3 games.
Overall: I find it amusing that this bundle of 10 games was really only 6 games, because several of them were reskins. The thing is, they’re all mindless casual games, made for playing when you’re bored or frazzled and don’t want to think. So basically, pick the style of block-matching you like the best (classic match-3 for me) and go for it.
Chateau Garden - Earn money via snood-like puzzles; build a garden with your winnings. The garden-building doesn’t even qualify as “simulation” as you’re just picking from three choices (at three different price points) for each item that is then automatically placed.
India Garden - This is exactly the same game as Chateau Garden, except the characters are Indian and they’re building a garden because of a curse, or in spite of a curse, or something. I didn’t much care.
Aztec Venture - A stereotypical white explorer comes to explore Aztec ruins and recover their treasures, and is guided by a local woman in a The Road to El Dorado costume. (“Only mildly racist.”) The real point is to drop colored blocks onto other colored blocks, matching them and hopefully setting off chain reactions. Every fifth level is a different sort of puzzle, rotating blocks or dropping marbles to open a door and retrieve a treasure. There are 105 levels, but I got tired of them before that.
Safari Venture - Clearly in the same vein as the above, this is another set of 105 block-dropping puzzles, though every fifth level is a standard match-3 puzzle instead. The theme is animals, there’s basically no story. I found this less offensive for that reason, but by the time I reached it, I was bored with the gameplay.
Jewel Venture wouldn't run on my mini-laptop, but worked fine on my gaming PC. It’s a standard match-3 Bejeweled clone, and the gimmick is there are ten modes (…though several of them are basically the same) and each stage has one level of each style. The time limits get punishingly harder as you progress through the levels, though nothing otherwise changes.
2 Planets Fire and Ice also wouldn't run on my mini-laptop, and in a lot of ways, is the same game as Jewel Venture, just with gems that are slightly harder to tell apart and power-ups that all look alike. (But for a “Bomber” level, only certain bombs count, despite all of the power-ups look like bombs. I’m also 90% certain that level was mis-programmed, as getting 25 bomb power-ups seems pretty insane for that sort of level.) The two planets are “with and without time limit;” the fire/ice thing seems to only be stylistic.
Galact Quest - This gets credit for having a plot, though it’s a stock sci-fi space adventure plot. The meat of the game is shooting gems up to match colors and get chains of removals…but you need to always hit them on an angle, and if you hit on the point it just breaks the gem, and you lose power-up energy. Which means you need to be precise but still fast, aiming with a wiggly mouse control. I’m not enthusiastic.
Ricky Raccoon - This was fairly standard match-3, in which there are half a dozen different puzzle styles, three of which appear when you’re grinding gold, and three of which appear in each of the five eight-level treasure hunt areas. Straightforward and repetitive, yes, but a decent variation of the genre with a definitive set of goals and ending. Also, the difficulty never goes to “absurd,” which can’t be said for some of the others in this pack.
Ricky Raccoon 2 - Adventures in Egypt - Similar to the two Garden games above, this is exactly the same as the first game, just with a slightly different framing story. Grind gold, unlock treasure maps, complete the levels within to find a treasure, repeat for each of the five treasures. Another three hours of excuse to play match-3 games.
Overall: I find it amusing that this bundle of 10 games was really only 6 games, because several of them were reskins. The thing is, they’re all mindless casual games, made for playing when you’re bored or frazzled and don’t want to think. So basically, pick the style of block-matching you like the best (classic match-3 for me) and go for it.
