Goolee

[b]2/10[/b] A direct port of a 2018 Android game about rearranging marbles on a grid, semi-working and locked up behind a signup for another service. [b]What is it:[/b] A logic game about moving marbles in a network of connected spots to get from an initial state to a target state. There are different spots connected in a network, with marbles in almost all the nodes and only 3 gaps which you can use to move the marbles around. You can only move one marble to an adjacent, connected spot, if that target spot is free. There are 4 marbles of 4 colors, for a total of 16 marbles, and 19 spots in 3 concentric rings and 3 extra spots, one in the center and two in opposite corners, which are never part of the solution but can be used as buffers so you can more easily maneuver the other marbles, shifting them from one spot to another, one by one putting them in the right place. Doing this once is a nice puzzle, good for a little mental challenge, on par with solving a 15-puzzle. There are three difficulty chapters, each with 20 different levels. The difference is that at the easy difficulty all three spare slots are free, at medium the center one is unusable, leaving just two spare slots, and at hard the two corner ones are unusable, with just one, the center, available as a gap. Other than having three, two, or just one gap to use, all 60 levels are the same, same number of marbles, same grid layout, just different target positions. Worse, the unavailable spots aren't completely unusable, they are just occupied by black marbles which you can still move, but doing that won't accomplish anything. The developers just didn't have to design a new board, or write more code to deal with the different board layout, they just added another marble to the starting position. Like I said above, doing this once is a nice puzzle, but doing it 60 times is boring. Its only appeal might be the same way solving a Rubik's Cube is appealing to some, not as a puzzle to solve, but as a challenge for solving it faster or more efficiently. And Goolee tries to be that, an alternative to speedcubing, tracking both the number of moves and the time taken to solve each level, and it even has worldwide leaderboards, and support for competition events. Except that these don't really work. Let’s start with the standalone puzzle functionality. First thing you notice after starting this game you just bought with a lot of money is that instead of a Play button, there's a Demo button which lets you try the first 5 easy levels. Why is a fully paid for game offering you just a demo? Because in order to play the full game you must sign up for a PlayFab account. In case you don’t know, that's Microsoft’s (acquired by) alternative to Steam’s gaming services, including cloud saving and leaderboards. So yeah, to play this game, you must sign up for another service, even if you don’t plan on participating in worldwide competitions. Once you decide to take the plunge and sign up, you can play the levels one by one, no jumping ahead. Technically you can unlock the medium/hard sets by using coins, but to get enough coins you have to complete all the previous levels, so it’s an useless alternative. Unless you decide to actually buy coins with real money, to unlock the content in the game which you already bought. Just 20/40 more of the same identical levels. Except that you can't actually do that, because the buying coins part is a dead feature from the mobile version of the game, which doesn't work in the Steam version because, duh, this is not an Android phone. OK, fine, let's say you want to use the Android version to buy the coins, and it's a good thing that this game uses an external service that works across systems to save your progress, because you can continue playing on the phone, and lucky for you, the app is free in the Google Play Store, you don’t have to pay another 13 dollars/euros (plus tax) to get it on another device. (Huh, sidenote, if it's free on a phone, for which this game was made, so it probably works better with a finger than a mouse, why does it cost that much on Steam?). So you log in again with this PlayFab account to restore your progress, except that surprise, despite forcing you to use a third party cross-platform service, the devs forgot to actually implement the cross-platform progress sync… OK, fine, forget about unlocking the harder levels, quicker, let's just play this and see how it is. Spoiler alert, it’s terrible. For a game that tries to enter the speedsolving scene, it has a lot of friction. To move a marble, you must click precisely on it, drag it over a directly adjacent spot, and unclick precisely over that spot. You cannot drag to a spot two connections over, and if you drag and drop just a little bit outside the target spot, the marble just jumps back to the starting cell. And no, it’s not better on a phone, it's worse since everything is smaller except the finger which is bigger than a mouse pointer. You can't speedsolve this when you have to carefully drag and drop each marble spot by spot. I tried to do series of steps quickly, but one mistake early on means that every subsequent step is wrong, and since there's no undo, now I have even more steps added to my counter and more time added to my timer… Slow and steady wins the race. Or in this case, rather slow and steady still loses the race, but at least it loses by less. Anyway, let's see how bad my score is, there's a World Ranking entry in the menu. Which shows an empty leaderboard. Did they not even implement the cross-platform leaderboards with this mandatory Microsoft-owned cross-platform service? I’m starting to believe that this external account that I had to sign up for was a little bit unnecessary. But wait, what's this? Battle Of Mind? Sounds interesting, let's battle mind! Mind strong, me want battle mind! There’s a current challenge, a monthly challenge, and a special challenge, and techlympics. (Am I the only one who thinks these challenge names make no sense?) Except that trying to join any of these challenges requires both a secret code, and 100 gems. Gems? How do I get some of those? Oh, I can buy them. From the store. Which doesn't work because, again, this is not an Android phone, and they didn't bother to change the code to work with the Steam purchasing service. FYI, on Android 100 gems cost 1$, and 1000 gems cost 11$, so I guess this game is also testing if you're dumb enough to not not know simple math. Are you familiar with Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment? It states: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Guess what, I received some emails in this game. One has the code for the monthly challenge, and one congratulates me for joining the challenge (I didn't) and rewards me with 100 coins and 5 gems! Except that there's no way to get these rewards out of the email. [b]How hard is it:[/b] Easy. [b]How long is it:[/b] 60 levels in 3 difficulty chapters, a few hours to solve each one at least once, must be solved in order. [b]Level design:[/b] I have this bit in most of my reviews, but there's just one basic level… I guess, how’s the whole game idea? Might be OK as a physical puzzle to tinker with, but not that interesting. [b]Quality:[/b] Terrible. One simple level repeated 60 times. Simple drag and drop controls, but very finicky. Basic graphics, badly chopped images for the marbles with no alpha blending and no AA, visible white pixels on the borders, and not even properly centered on the target spots. No settings other than one mute toggle. No cloud saving, no achievements, no workshop, no leaderboards. Broken features. [b]Worth the price:[/b] No, and it dares to ask you to buy even more in-game currencies. [b]Most positive aspect for me:[/b] A nice little puzzle you can practice a few times until you get the hang of it. [b]Most negative aspect for me:[/b] I can’t pick just one! (Review length limit exceeded by a lot...)