Recent reviews by Ezra

Honestly, maybe it's my fault for going in on a recommendation that it's similar to Tetris, but I didn't enjoy this very much.

• I found most of the music to be supremely annoying (I ended up turning it off and just listening to my own instead)
  
• The character voices are aggravating and include a lot of anime girls moan-yelling :/
  
• I find the default orientation of the buttons to be weird. This can be changed in settings though, if you're used to the orientation in Tetris.
  
• More than anything, I just didn't enjoy the battle strategy element of it, which seems to be the whole game.
  
• I hate that the "X" is visibly on-screen. This is where the pieces spawn and if you run out of space and put a piece overlapping it, you lose. I think it being visible on-screen is awkward and makes it less intuitive to determine what placements will fail you. (e.g. if I place one below it, will the spawning of the next piece immediately fail me? The answer seems to be no, but that's, again, not intuitive.)
  
  The strategy seems to be almost... learn how to eloquently fail? It's hard to describe. Instead of intentionally making matches of 4, it seems the strategy is to make lots of matches of 3 and then start a cascade of matches in order to create the most "trash" for your opponent. I dislike this a lot for a number of reasons:
  
  
• The ability to landslide beat your opponent has a lot to do with chance, unless you can somehow magically plan out the entire game board before starting. This seems evidenced by me playing against someone online who seemed excellent at playing and sped along to an early death in round one but then got a cascade of matches in the second round that basically filled my entire board in one move. They clearly knew what they were doing and still died of their own accord in round 1. Not a good sign.
  
• The amount of strategy in that, therefore, feels sloppy and unrewarding
  
• I dislike that everything is battles. Maybe that's specific to this game (Champions). I didn't choose this one, I was gifted it or got it in a bundle or something so it's my first PuyoPuyo experience. I enjoy playing, you guessed it, Tetris, where you play by yourself and compete against speed, not other people. I wasn't a huge fan of Tetris99 for this reason. "Trash" mechanisms to attack other people are extremely boring on the offensive and frustrating on the defensive.
  
  Anyway, I may come back and play this here and there if the mood strikes me to work on getting the achievements for it, because it's not an insufferable game, but I can't think of anyone who I would recommend it to. I would sooner recommend Tetris99 or something.

This is an excellent i-spy game with an adorable art style and lots of moving parts.

While going through the base game, there were some levels that got a bit overwhelming or had hard items to find, which stressed me out because I went into it too single-mindedly focused on completing it, but if you're in a patient mindset and focus more on enjoying the journey than trying to rush it, the game is very relaxing.

Most simple games like this, once I complete them, I don't come back to them, but I think I may very well come back to this one regularly. It's a good background game for when you're busy doing something else that's not taking your full attention. There are online maps submitted by other players and, while they're kind of hit or miss in quality, the ones that hit are really cool, cute, and often clever in design.

If you like i-spy games or are looking for something to put in front of a child, this game is excellent at its job. 100% recommend. And I'm looking forward to getting DLC for it as well.

I'm not usually much for platformers because they make me rage, but this one was so cute that I had to give it an honest shot. The difficulty level was pretty challenging, but not to the same degree as many hardcore platformers reach. I was able to beat it, which is more than I can say for most, and in only about 4 hours no less.

I LOVED the art. Cartoon bugs acting like people... wearing hardhats... unionizing...

Anyway, if you like platformers even a little, this one is really great.

My criticisms are few. I found the worm in the ocean level to be kind of infuriating, and not in a challenging kind of way, but in a poorly balanced kind of way. It felt like the worm's body had way too many hit boxes and way too large. It was sporadic in the way it would fall and led to a lot of deaths that I would say were unavoidable, which is annoying. Fortunately, the game is pretty generous with save points, so it usually only meant going back a short distance.

Honestly... I can't even think of anymore complaints, only praises.

• You can customize keybinds
  
• The controls were comfortable and didn't have any kind of lag or resistance, which I find happens more often than I'd like with platformers. It was responsive and easy to control.
  
• The secret skulls you have to find for achievements do not have to be gotten consecutively in one game, so, after completing the game, you can select the levels you're missing them on and go back and get them. The achievement you get for getting all of them is accessed from the menu, so no need to replay the entire game.
  
• The story is cute
  
• The difficulty increases steadily and doesn't linger on any one kind of mechanic for too long, keeping the game interesting right up until the end
  
• The music was fun, suited the game, and was changed up here and there to keep it from getting repetitive
  
  All in all, highly recommend. I would die for this disabled bee.

If it's on sale or a dollar is negligible to you, this is a cute game for a short burst of activity. It took me 18 minutes to complete it. It's a bit achievement farm-ey since it gives one for every bird, but that's whatever. My only complaints are, there's no game-over/game-completed screen, so you just have to kind of awkwardly hit escape and exit when you're done. Made winning feel a bit anticlimactic. And there's also no mute button or volume slider for the background music, so I ended up having to mute the game in my computer's volume mixer. Nothing wrong with the music per se, just a bit loud and I already had music playing.

So basically, cute way to waste twenty minutes, might last a bit longer for a child or if you're not an extremely visual person.

Play it in browser for free. I got this on Steam thinking it would be nice to be able to get all of the achievements on here but the trouble is, this game progresses at a glacial speed and needs to be running constantly. When you have it in browser, it doesn't feel like that time is doing anything. It's just there, running at max cookie income in the background. With Steam, it's constantly racking up play hours where it's open and running but you're not playing, which I really hate. I could be wrong, but I also feel like my computer is working harder when I have to run a whole program rather than have it open in browser. There is a tool you can unlock after prestiging that allows you to continue collecting cookies while the game is closed, but it only lets you have 5% of your normal cookie production for the first hour it's closed, and then drops to .5%. That's an insane downgrade when you could just leave the game open.

The problem is, then you end up doing what I've just done, which is leaving the game running for about 5 days 6 days nonstop in order to get my regular cookie production. Because when I get on it the next day, I want to actually be able to progress instead of just sitting and staring at the game extremely passively for many hours.

Basically, your options are: 1) Run the game at all times, keeping your computer on and working at all hours of the day, in order to progress at glacial speeds; 2) Close the game at night and play mostly passively/intermittently throughout the day and play at even more glacial speeds and feel like you're going nowhere.

There are additional upgrades you can get with a lot more prestige chips, but these take a lot of time to rack up. They allow you to very slowly add to the percentage of your normal cookie production that you can earn while offline. If I can't earn my normal production offline after 150 hours of running the game and playing continually (during the daytime portion of this), getting upgrades many times an hour, something is janky. Anyway, I'm just really disappointed. I didn't realize how unbalanced this game was and how much senseless application-running it would require.

Devs, consider making offline production a bit quicker to reach, at least for the Steam version. If I'm going to have my play hours tracked, I want it to actually reflect the time I'm putting into upgrading and clicking and not just passively collecting cookies. And, take me as a prime example: those who want the income will run the game endlessly to get them. Putting a useless offline production debuff to make the game artificially more difficult isn't going to stop people from just running it forever. It's just going to irritate the ♥♥♥♥ out of people.

I was really disappointed with this game. On its surface, it appears to be a strong logic game, but it fails at the weak link that so many logic games do: the logic is not sealed tightly enough. There are too many puzzles where multiple solutions appear possible, but aren't.

I know there are people in the reviews who have sat down with notebooks and done tons of math and planning to figure out the right format before putting their answer in, and that's well and great for them, but you shouldn't need to do that to play a game like this. For someone with strong logic capabilities, you should be able to study the board patiently and come up with the solution with just the tools the game gives you, and I didn't find that to be the case.

The visuals of the game, in theory, are fine. It's simple, the placement of things is okay, and it's easily navigable. However, in execution, the colors were often glaringly saturated, the lines on the board were all slightly different from each other in thickness, leading to a janky-looking board, and the text was so thin that, on a standard-resolution laptop, it was hard to read and looked broken up.

• As everyone else has said, it's extremely annoying that you have to flag every right square even when you've removed all of those that need removing.
  
• Most noticeably in the last few levels, at some point, the counters on the edges of the board break. This is absolutely not acceptable for a game this simple and which relies on this feature so heavily. What had already become a tedious game became even more tedious as I had to resort to manually counting which flags I'd placed already before making any new moves
  
• There's no setting to turn off the moving background, which I found was very visual-overload. It was slightly better in dark mode but, if I had any more visual sensitivity, I could see this triggering vertigo or a migraine.
  
• Personally, I am not a fan of strategy games like this with a set solution where you get rated on if you made no mistakes. It seems punitive and redundant. It's not challenging or rewarding to simply reset and redo the puzzle immediately upon imperfect completion just so you can get your full 3-star rating. There's no point to this.
  
  
  Conclusion
  So, all in all, I wouldn't recommend this game. I've seen many other reviewers praising the hexagonal sister game, which I plan to try and which I hope lives up to the hype, but this one I would recommend passing on. Even on sale, I don't feel like the ¢50 or whatever was actually worth the frustration of playing it.
  
  
  
  
  

This is genuinely one of my new favorite games. It takes the setting of chess and puts a spin on it. Instead of moving a whole team of pieces, you just get your king, who everyone left (because he sucks), and his shotgun. You still need to know how all of the chess pieces work, you still need to have a good mind for strategy, but it's constantly changing, making for a new and interesting experience and challenge.

Like standard chess, you start with a chess board. Your king is your only piece, but it's fine, because he's also got a gun. This game does have a small story played out before and after a run, but that's not the kind of game it is. It's done in runs. There are 12 floors in a run and, usually, each floor is done by killing the opposing king. You may have to get through some of his troops first, naturally.

After each floor, you get to select two cards from a selection of 4 - one black card, for you, and one white card, for the opponent. The black cards typically have a boost for you and the white cards typically have a rule change or boost for the opposing team, which is always changing. For example, trading out one of their bishops for 2 pawns, or something like that.

Going through each run is always slightly different because you get to select different sets of cards and fight a slightly different variation of the opposing team. That's why the majority of the achievements for this game come down to winning with different challenge sets. However, there are also achievements for beating it with different guns, which you can select and unlock before starting, and for beating it with different ranks, which add layers of difficulty.

Basically, if you enjoy chess or generally any kind of strategy board game, this is definitely worth trying. It might end up being one of your favorites too!

I'm really enjoying this game! When I first found it, I was on the fence in terms of optimism. I've seen silly-looking games end up being kind of annoying and not as funny as the writers thought it would be. This one, I actually do think the gimmick landed.

While the cutscenes can be a bit slow-paced (a 2x speed option might be nice, in case you don't want to skip them entirely), the writing is genuinely silly and clever more often than not. There have been many times where a joke's punchline finally hit where I just put my face in my hands and sighed (in a good way). This game really did something interesting and new and I applaud the creators for daring to think outside the box


When it comes to the content of the game, I noticed the store page has "clicker" as one of the tags. This is patently false. While this game has a pretty heavy idle element, idles and clickers are not the same thing. There is no rapid clicking (or even moderate clicking) required. It's more of what I would consider an idle RPG.

Your job is to help save your town by recovering the lost, magical outfit owned by the king's father (or grandfather?). To do this, you have to fight a bunch of adversaries created by the villain who shan't be named. This is done by going on short adventures - a sidescrolling single-wave trek through 1 of 7 areas that unlock as you level up. Each trek is about a minute long and involves automated gathering of resources and fighting of enemies.

There is a bit of an active element in the form of spells which you can use to assist your heroes. However, this is generally only useful in small bursts, like if you need to fight a boss and your heroes are struggling. Most of the time, it's better to just grind out areas they're strong enough to do without player spellcasting and then just leveling them up until the next area is manageable for them.

Outside of this idle adventuring segment, the rest of the game functions very much as an idle RPG. You use resources to craft goods, sell them for money, upgrade your heroes' armor, upgrade buildings, unlock new spells and buffs, and so on.

The unique element of this is the Swag portion of it. Unlike a standard fantasy RPG, this game also has a fashion gimmick. Each piece of armor or weaponry has a material, color, and fashion rating. There are frequent fashion shows that you need to dress your characters up for and participate in. The judges can be bribed with gold and the top three contestants win resources and money as prizes. Each win also gains your town more reputation in the world of fashion, which is important.


All in all, I haven't run into many issues. The few issues I've run into have had easy fixes or can be finagled to not be an issue anymore.

• When closing the game and then opening it the next day, the 4th outfit slot for each character had been wiped (except for the one who I had left *in* her 4th outfit slot). This was a pain, since these slots had their swag outfits in them for easy switching at competition time. I'm still not sure why this happened.
  
• At one point, some items I no longer wanted weren't showing up in the marketplace for me to sell. I kept playing and just tried to ignore this. When I closed and reopened the game, they reappeared and I was able to sell them
  
• While on treks, I've had some trouble with my heroes not using available potions when they need to. They'll be down to 20/200hp while fighting a creature that hits in the 50-80 range and, instead of using their turn to use a potion, they attack instead, ending up getting killed because of it. I've noticed that stocking potions in their individual potion slots rather than relying on the caravan potion slot has made this much more of a non-issue
  
• It's not quite a problem, but worth mentioning as a negative, since many people dislike this: it can be quite grindy. You'll have to grind out the adventures to gather resources to make armor to sell to make money, rinse, repeat. This wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue if there was an automatic continue option. However, after each individual mission, you have to manually select the rest and heal buttons and then tell them to do the run again. Personally, I think it would be an excellent end-game research reward to be able to automate the runs, at least a certain number of times. I can see not wanting to break the game by making it possible for people to leave it running for hours by itself, but, allowing players to set it to run through a trek ~10 times without needing to manually restart it would be a huge bonus imo
  
  
  Conclusion
  
  All in all, I find this to be an extremely charming game. If you like having something fairly idle to work on while watching TV or scrolling social media on your phone, it's a great side-game, as you can use that shared time to do the grindy parts of the game and then focus more on the improvement and expansion of your teams when you've got a lot of resources saved up and want to actually give the game your full attention. If you like RPGs, idles, or anything in that vein, this is definitely worth giving a play

I'm only 5 hours in and I'm obsessed with this game. If you love strategy and cards wrapped up in a more or less chill experience, this game is probably up your alley.

Each play through takes you further as you get better at planning and unlock more "ideas" (recipes). You can craft things without recipes as well, but it involves a lot of trial and error. The irritating parts, like animals moving around and bumping your cards, can be solved by building pens for them. Buildings get faster as you build better versions of them.

It's a really relaxing and fun game and checks all the boxes for me, especially Easy to Learn, Hard to Master.

I've been a fan of the Bloons series since I played the first game about 14 years ago, back when it was just a single-map flash game online. I was hesitant about the jump 6 makes into more 3-dimensional graphics, but it's actually grown on me. I like what they've done with adding the heroes and expanding on old "towers"

If you enjoy tower defense games, I can't think of one I'd recommend more than this one. It's fun for both kids and adults, has tons of different maps, and posts daily challenges to keep the game interesting even after beating all of the maps. Plus, there are special modes you can try beating, limiting which towers you can use and so on.