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chuckroDungeon of Elements - A Dr. Mario clone with tacked-on fantasy rpg elements, which allow you to gather vendortrash and guess at ways to combine it. You also have an equipped weapon that lets you destroy targeted “monsters” with a long cooldown, which helps deal with annoying bits trapped in weird corners. It's a bit stiff-moving, and I'm not sure if that's my computer or the game. I also get this nagging feeling that I've played it before, though I can't find it in my logs. As with many casual games with rpg frameworks, it's an excuse to play a lot of the casual game, but the crafting minigame is very simple once you see a couple of patterns in the combinations, and the levels provide no benefit to the casual-gaming experience, so I'd put it in the lower tier of this style of game.
Defend Your Life - A tower defense game in which you're attempting to defend your body against hostile invading germs...with cannons and lasers, because that's how science works. Ridiculous concept aside, this is a pretty decent tower defense game. You can unlock permanent boosts and also temporary bonuses, and you get a “hero” character who gains levels, so there’s a progression in what you can accomplish even if your strategy isn’t perfect. There are only 20 levels, though the Easy, Medium and Hard versions of them are different and often pull in different quirks (forbidden certain buildings or bringing in different enemies).
ReignMaker - A match-3 game melded onto a town-building simulation game, with tower defense elements (when you make a match, it fires magic at the approaching enemies). Like Dungeon of Elements, it’s not actually terribly deep and ends up being mostly repetitive, but if you like there to be an excuse plot and slowly-unlocking power-up options for your match-3 game, it’s not a bad choice. My biggest complaint is that it doesn’t auto-mix the board if there are no available matches left. At that point, either you use an item or spell, or you lose the round. (This only happened to me on the small, constrained boards, though.)
Plantera – Vaguely a garden simulation, but basically a tapper game. Plant roots, bushes and trees and tap the produce to turn it into coins. Tap pests to drive them away. Coins accumulate when you aren’t playing. Keep growing your farm until you get Achievements. On the plus side, there’s no IAP. On the minus side, it’s not a single-screen game nor is it on a portable system, which defeats a lot of the usefulness of a mindless tapper game.
Hyperdrive Massacre - An arena-fighter shooting game, intended for local multiplayer, with Asteroids-style physics and one-hit kills. As there are mines, shields and power-ups, it seems like it would be a fairly deep example of the genre, if I was interested in the genre.
The lost joystick - Fairly standard platformer, with wonky hitboxes, ten levels, and an excuse plot about a stolen joystick. Nothing special.
The Divine Paradox - A lackluster RPGMaker game with a slow-moving combat engine and a steep difficulty curve. (You can make it through the first dungeon in five minutes, having fought two battles. The monsters in the second dungeon will then murder you.) The concept is okay, as the hero travels to three time periods to try to prevent his terrible future from coming to pass, but it promises to be too long and frustrating to be worth the time.
I apparently already owned TREBUCHET, Taimumari and Spaceship Looter. Either they’re in bundles I haven’t finished or they just didn’t make much impact on my memory.
Overall: The puzzle/casual games were, while not amazing, decently entertaining and enough to make the bundle worthwhile.
Defend Your Life - A tower defense game in which you're attempting to defend your body against hostile invading germs...with cannons and lasers, because that's how science works. Ridiculous concept aside, this is a pretty decent tower defense game. You can unlock permanent boosts and also temporary bonuses, and you get a “hero” character who gains levels, so there’s a progression in what you can accomplish even if your strategy isn’t perfect. There are only 20 levels, though the Easy, Medium and Hard versions of them are different and often pull in different quirks (forbidden certain buildings or bringing in different enemies).
ReignMaker - A match-3 game melded onto a town-building simulation game, with tower defense elements (when you make a match, it fires magic at the approaching enemies). Like Dungeon of Elements, it’s not actually terribly deep and ends up being mostly repetitive, but if you like there to be an excuse plot and slowly-unlocking power-up options for your match-3 game, it’s not a bad choice. My biggest complaint is that it doesn’t auto-mix the board if there are no available matches left. At that point, either you use an item or spell, or you lose the round. (This only happened to me on the small, constrained boards, though.)
Plantera – Vaguely a garden simulation, but basically a tapper game. Plant roots, bushes and trees and tap the produce to turn it into coins. Tap pests to drive them away. Coins accumulate when you aren’t playing. Keep growing your farm until you get Achievements. On the plus side, there’s no IAP. On the minus side, it’s not a single-screen game nor is it on a portable system, which defeats a lot of the usefulness of a mindless tapper game.
Hyperdrive Massacre - An arena-fighter shooting game, intended for local multiplayer, with Asteroids-style physics and one-hit kills. As there are mines, shields and power-ups, it seems like it would be a fairly deep example of the genre, if I was interested in the genre.
The lost joystick - Fairly standard platformer, with wonky hitboxes, ten levels, and an excuse plot about a stolen joystick. Nothing special.
The Divine Paradox - A lackluster RPGMaker game with a slow-moving combat engine and a steep difficulty curve. (You can make it through the first dungeon in five minutes, having fought two battles. The monsters in the second dungeon will then murder you.) The concept is okay, as the hero travels to three time periods to try to prevent his terrible future from coming to pass, but it promises to be too long and frustrating to be worth the time.
I apparently already owned TREBUCHET, Taimumari and Spaceship Looter. Either they’re in bundles I haven’t finished or they just didn’t make much impact on my memory.
Overall: The puzzle/casual games were, while not amazing, decently entertaining and enough to make the bundle worthwhile.
