App Store Editors’ Notes

Game Stew Fun

I’ve been a fan of this developer for a very long time. Their unique take on world building coupled with simple,addictive mechanics are a fun combination. Like most Game Stew games, the economy is very unforgiving, I had to delete and reinstall the game four times to reset my economy until I found a build path that let me finish the game. This isn’t their funnest offering, but I enjoyed it and - as always - I eagerly anticipate their next release.

Charming but horrible mechanics

The devs did a great job with the theme and visual design, but the gameplay mechanics offer very little room for skill or strategy. This is mostly due to the enemy’s attacks being so unpredictable. This game’s main mechanic is about increasing the power of tiles by matching 3, but you get only 4 moves per round, so you also need to line things up for the next round. HOWEVER, the enemy’s attacks are unpredictable, and affect many tiles. Basically every round the enemy destroys about 10-20% of the tiles on the board, which are replaced by random tiles. HOWEVER, the random tiles increase in value the further you are in the encounter. SO, part of the strategy is maximizing the number of replaced tiles so you keep getting relevantly powerful tiles, as any earlier tiles become too hard to upgrade due to the random destruction every round. This means that your early attempts to line things up for good combinations are basically irrelevant, as thats alot of effort for relatively low tier results, while random new tiles are higher level by default. ULTIMATELY, you are far more reliant on RNG than you are on skill and planning, which basically ruins this game and turns it into a low skill low effort tapping timekiller.

Gonna keep trying

So far, this game has not felt like a great $3 spent. The tutorial is pretty minimal and there is what feels like quite a bit of RNG. It’s quite possible that I just don’t understand what’s going on, but I cannot seem to identify any enemy patterns or ways around the difficulty and issues at hand. On top of that, the first secret weapon they have you unlock has been unable to deploy for me since unlocking it. Once again, I cannot find any direction on how to properly deploy it. It’s all rather confusing. I will keep trying it out though to see if I can figure out what’s going on.

Good follow up

Fun like the first one after you get a feel for balancing the weapons against the people, power plants etc. Maybe not as awesome as Devils Shard but still a fun time killer.

Very good like the first one, but the balance feels bad

I’m okay with the battles being RNG heavy, but the loss of money at the end of each mission if it happens to go on for too long is not enjoyable. Upgrades get really expensive for very minor benefit, so a player could get stuck with upgrading the wrong thing as well.

Low effort

I suspect Gamestew was placed into less caring hands. I used to love their games until they started releasing those low effort AI art games. They used to put much more depth and story into their games but this one in particular is worse than the first and feels like they just wanted mkney based on the goodwill the company established in the beginning. Maybe they were sold or lost a key team member but this is not the gamestew I used to enjoy and support.

Just take the few minutes to learn

Never review games but here I am. Honestly pretty fun once you take the few minutes to learn the game.

Lacks sufficient instructions

Quite a good game but there are barely any instructions (and the English is weak for much of the instructions there are). I've played it a bunch of times but still have no idea what "EPs" are (just they are crucial for many special weapons?

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