[h1]See [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34168470-Trutek-Gaming/]curator page[/url] for more reviews. [/h1]
Tl;dr - game has still plenty of bugs and serious balance issues, and seems to be abandoned by devs.
Oafmatch is a match 3 rpg, very similar to Puzzle Quest series. You fight by making matches which deal damage and grant mana, which is spent on various special abilities. In Oafmatch you have party of 4 characters, each of them has one special passive ability, one strong and one medium skill out of 6, which correspond to 6 gem colors, they also have two slots for equipment, which make for skills in this game.
What is good about Oafmatch is the number of available heroes and skills, there is plenty of variety, so you can experiment with various builds.
And that's mostly the end of strong points of the game.
The game offers two modes:campaign and so called roguelike mode. Campaign is pretty barebone, you just move from one dot (battle) to another on the map, sometimes you have choice to select battles or to skip some of them. There is also an arena on each map, in which you fight infinite waves of enemies, which get harder over time. Compared to Puzzle Quest or Galactrix this is very basic, because in campaigns of those games not only there was much more freedom in map movement, but also there was something to do between battles, like mining resources, gathering blueprints and crafting things in Galactrix, or capturing monsters and cities in PQ. Story is very poor even for a game which doesn't takes it's story very seriously, especially the ending is very shallow.
Second mode, which also has it's variation which you can play after the campaign is so called roguelike mode, which again is very basic - you are present with tow different battles with different rewards, and you just have to select one of them - and so until the end of game. It really could be at least a little more complicated.
The game also has massive amount of bugs and balance/design problems, and it's obvious that it neither was tested at all, or only "tested" by some streamers or tubers, to which devs gave some keys hoping they will get more sales that way, tubers recorded some videos getting their attention and money from views or when they thought the game is not interesting just probably put the testing key on everybody's favourite key site to earn few bucks anyway, and so everyone is happy and no one cares for bugs, except the people who actually paid money for this. I have played this game mostly on 1.03 version (and each of three patches have large bug lists), and I still have encountered about dozen of bugs, varying from graphic and text bugs to gamebreaking stuff like for example blank tiles on board, some equipment not dropping properly, or heroes joining fully upgraded when they are not supposed to do so. This game should still be in beta or more probably in so popular those days early access.
There are also heavy problems with balance near the end game. There is hard cap for level of your characters, which leaves you somewhere in late 2/3 of the game in situation in which you have tons of now useless gold and where enemies, especially in the arenas have higher level than you. It maybe wouldn't be so bad, but there are also another issues. Enemies come in two types, heroes which are identical to the ones you get and who can use same equipment as you and also can make matches, and a lesser type of enemies, let's call them minions, which can't make matches and have in most cases only one fixed ability, but to compensate that, they have passive mana gain every turn. They also gain additional benefits - even when you have about 20 levels more than them, they the same or higher HP as your characters, and actually higher stats than you, so when they sometimes manage to make matches thanks to their special gems, they are quite strong. In around the middle of game, a problem arises with the power of you matches - they seem to be getting weaker as the game progress, instead of being the same or stronger, and you need a lot of even 5-matches to kill single minion. So later you will be doing majority of damage with the skills, and like other reviewers say, equipment comes in ranks, and the jump from one rank to another in damage done is in many cases quite insane. Damage done by cheap 6 mana skill rank 5 skill compared to damage done by two matches needed to gather that mana is laughable. Other issue is that later enemies get very powerful skill gems, which not only sometimes can oneshot your heroes or have additional effects like long stun, they also have low mana requirements and low activation times. What is even worse is that in many cases there will two or three of the same monsters, so they will gain more mana of their colour, and they will sometimes placing their gems every turn, so the board will very quickly run out of gems of that colour, which will leave you defenseless unless you have some skill to destroy them. And some of those gems have additional lives, forcing you to match them twice or more to make things worse. Placing gems by AI takes much time, it is especially infuriating when they will gain enough mana to place something like half of dozen of them, it is faster to alt-tab the game, kill it process and to restart it and the fight that to wait for animation to end! There is also lack of balance in regards what characters game gives to you in campaign, it gives you many heroes with purple and white as their primary colour, but doesn't gives you second character with primary yellow until few fights near the end of the game. Some of heroes have also much better passive skills that others, which pretty much makes some of them mandatory. It is quite similar with items/active skills, so there is not that much actual variety.
After initial waves of patches, devs went quiet and the game seems to be abandoned, and before that they wrote that they are unable to reproduce and patch some of mentioned bugs. Game is not recommend unless you played every Puzzle Quest clone in existence and you still want more. If you didn't already, it is better to play original Puzzle Quest or some other, better of it clones.
