Caramba!

Caramba came off to me as an effortless matching game, suited towards being a Mobile game too. But the graphics were all right, there was the settings to adjust the Sound/Music as well as Full screen. The animations upon completion each level was smooth, and the music fine and dandy too. That is, until an error is encountered after completing level 9, which makes level 10 and all other levels are that unplayable. There is no way to overcome this, nor has there been fixes found for the [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1494717924]grey ‘screen of death’[/url] that pops up after you connect the last pair on level 9. This alone, is enough to render the game unplayable as well as NOT to be recommended to anyone. [strike]Unless, you want revenge or to troll another user on Steam lol.[/strike] Until the developers fix this major issue, this game gets a thumbs down from me.

Caramba!, which actually is written without the exclamation mark if you run it through your Steam library, looks something very very indie and minimalistic since its premises - the developers, some guys called Russian Pirates (sic.), just wrote that we'll have to train our memory and find the treasures of some captain. The game opens with a soothing, nice soundtrack reminding me my old pirate literature years, and starts with a simple 5x4 field made up by 20 different covered cards. The problems start showing upon the very first game - on the upper side of the screen there's the usual time counter, starting as a weird (mmh? xD) 88 seconds, but there are no instructions or buttons whatsoever. This is always a bad thing, but I found out that actually there's worse than this - mashing buttons to search some hotkey, I found Esc being somehow a pause button - on hitting it, you'll instantly go back to the main menu and viceversa. That's really stupid in my opinion - no in-game pause button, but hitting Esc will transport you to the main menu and on the same time will pause the timer only to be restored when you'll hit Continue or the same Esc key again. Then, the game works as a normal memory matching game - you'll uncover without penalties two cards at a time, and you'll be asked to match them by uncovering the same two and thus reminding their position. The main problem of the game is that, even for a minimalistic memory game (which is definitely not the most innovative thing in terms of puzzle games..), the cards' images are.. just bad. They are badly-drawn. They tend to be all related to a pirate/sea world, but they all look almost the same. Rifles, shotguns, cannons.. all are drawn in a very similar shape and the background is the same for every single tile - an annoying red and yellow polygon that has the same colors of the images on the two sides of it. This makes this small memory game even more frustrating. It's not hard at all despite the timer, since you don't get penalties or whatever - you'll also find that there are multiple couples of the same card on a single field - but it's just bad to play, the cards look all the same, the music gets boring after a while and there's really no point at all in going on with the levels. Yes, there are many levels but they all look the same. Nothing is added apart from the most minimalistic match-2 tiles thing. This game deserves a huge thumbs down even without talking about the big issues created by the bugs that start appearing after level 10 and the lack of answers from the developers. I'd really not recommend to anyone to play this game until the 10th level.. just go and find a free memory game, it'll be better than this one for sure even if it doesn't feature pirates..