Terminal squad: Sentinel

混搭玩法不错，剧情聊胜于无吧，当个刺激点的三消玩玩还是不错的，22块贵了

A great concept of piloting a mech and fighting an alien horde through match three gameplay. You get a squadron of 'J's (every member of your eight woman team has a name that starts with the letter 'J') and must battle constantly spawning swarms of aggressive alien critters. I like the concept. The game is simple and puts you into the action right away. You level up, improve and configure each member of your troop independently. Every tenth level you will face an alien boss who will drop a new module which you can slot into your mech giving you either new or improved abilities. As you advance the levels the aliens will not only increase in strength and numbers but also hazards which affect the match three board (such as blocking sections of it). Unfortunately its not all positives. Instead of saving your position every level, you get a savepoint every ninth level (just before the boss fight on the tenth). This makes the game somewhat grindy as you have to set apart enough time to play at least 10 levels or lose that particular progress. While this savepoint structure in itself is not a huge problem it becomes one when the game has a couple of bugs which can ruin a run. Unfortunately these are quite frequent. The first one are crashes: nothing left to do here but restart the game. The second is a rare board freeze which prevents you from matching stones but still allows the aliens to continue their attack on your mech, forcing you to exit the run (this is particularly disheartening when you are one or two levels away from a savepoint). The game also holds your hand a little too much by offering a hint if you don't make a move after a couple of seconds. Personally I think the hint kicks in too quickly and is a little too intrusive, sometimes breaking your chain of thought. I should be able to either configure the hint response time or be able to switch it off in the settings if I so desired. Overall I like the game and the fact that you can configure your mech according to your preferred strategies and this influences how important a particular stone colour will be for that specific configuration. Each level can be as long or as short as you want by completing the level's stone sequence requirement. This creates a really interesting dilemma: should you play a level longer to gain more credits or advance to the next level as quickly as possible to get to the savepoint? Also, tactically, it creates some really interesting situations where you either gamble your mech to try to close the level's required sequence or break the sequence to fire your weapons or initiate repairs forcing you to start the sequence over. At such a low price the game is well worth it.