8/10 Tile/number-base puzzle collection
TLDR: Despite ugly looks and imperfect controls in some of the games, the amount of content offered here for free is incredible.
Good:
+ 50 puzzle types (grouped into 6 categories), most of them invented by the dev. For each you have several levels of difficulty given for free + a few free levels that are given every week. That's a stunning amount of content! As you see from my playtime, I've spent 4.4 hours in the game. Yet I only scratched its surface by trying some of the games a few times and just reading the rules for others. You could spend weeks, even months playing this without ever paying
So-so:
+/- difficulty is moderate only for the first few puzzles in each category, and quickly ramps up for the rest. Even with the easer variants, increased field sizes get pretty difficult. Which is good if you a hardcore gamer (yeah, us old farts), and a dealbreaker if you grew up on mobile and could be diagnosed as an infantile narcissist who may never lose anything, ever. Like, if you failed to win a level just once, go downvote that evil game for daring to challenge your ego... Yep. I dunno. This game was made in 2019. And it shows! In the sense that how dare it be so difficult! We should all file a collective complaint to Gabe Newell because games should be 100%-able for anyone including a person with a learning disability in a coma... and their dog...
Bad:
- gfx are pretty much nil here. It's actually funny how much effort the developer (who seems to be just 1 guy) spent on gameplay here and how little he cared about what actually sells games: the aesthetics. UI is also pretty much atrocious. I happen to know the Unity engine, so it's all plain default Arial font and the gray default drop-down lists here. Even the typical bug of too slow scrolling of the lists haunts this app and makes it remind cheap trash re-makes from Ukraine or Vietnam (except that it's not a porn 2D tile slider). This stark contrast inside the dev's approach makes me think that either 1) he got all these games from someone else or from purchased templates? or 2) he is really the extreme case of a programmer nerd who has IQ140+ combined with zero artistic taste. The second case I actually had in my boss at my last job (which was over a decade ago). He never understood why users didn't like the app, despite the sales people telling him that it looks plain ugly. To him, it was a sign of collective human stupidity. Well, I dunno, humans are visual creatures. Culture and art are there for a reason. Spending modest amounts on hiring an artist here would help this game a lot. Becuase tons of effort got essentially wasted (82 reviews in 6 years? cmon..)
- just 1 music track which is okay by itself... But it's just one track, so you'd get tired of it after 15 minutes, inevitably turn off the music - and now you're either playing in silence or play your own music in the background (say, stream something for free from Youtube). I dunno, I guess, with huge libraries now accessible to devs almost for free, getting a few dozens of relaxing tracks would be easy. Maybe not in 2019? Actually, it was so in 2019, too. Laziess? Greed?
- controls are clumsy in some minigames e.g. those where you drag lines. That's probably the dev wanted to save effort and make controls work the same way across all of the 50 minigames. It's understandable but still it wold be better for players if controls were more thought-thru in every specific minigame
My review may seem harsh but it's not. I'm just amazed how this app manages to combine extremely good sides with negligence and incompetence in other aspects. Most of the fixes here would be easy and obvious.
Weekly puzzles seem to be working in 2025, that's 6 years after release. Given the huge number of minigames, I'd venture a guess that they simply get generated programmatically inside the app. The dev wouldn't keep churning out so many puzzles by hand for all this time, it would be just ridiculous given the low download numbers this app is getting now. If I'm correct, then kudos on actually writing all those puzzle-generation algos for so many minigames.
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