Watermelon Challenge

7/10 A casual game somewhat reminding 2048. Good: - a great silly music track. It gives the game a certain unserious feel and makes it very enjoyable. Though there isn't much variety in music, and it does get repetitive after about 20-30 minutes playing - the idea is novel, or at least I haven't seen it implemented anywhere: you drop fruits of random lower tiers into a well, they bounce around using a physics engine, and if 2 of the same tier touch each other, they merge into a fruit of a higher tier. The speed at which you can drop fruits is not limited, so you can keep dropping new fruits as the old ones are still bouncing around So-so: - I could imagine this game very fun to be played with kids if you are a parent. That is, if it would have hotseat multiplayer. However, it only has online multiplayer. And since the game is premium, there is obviously too few players ever online, so you are unlikely to find an opponent randomly. So I haven't seen how multiplayer works here. Still, I'm pretty sure that same-computer multiplayer would be easy to implement. One player could be controlling 1 duck with the mouse and the other player another duck with the keyboard. Or both of them with the keyboard, e.g. one with WASD, another with arrow keys or numpad. Since there are just 4 buttons, they could be configurable for both player. The obvious design for multiplayer is 2 separate wells where each duck throws its fruits, and the players don't interact, just compete in parallel. However, maybe a more interesting design could be if 2 ducks throw fruits into the same well, but somehow only 1 of them gets score for any given match. E.g. the one that threw the fruit (of the matched pair) that entered the field later. There could be more modes as well if one would want to have a funny game for kids, parties of friends and maybe couples - and this works best when you both are at the same PC - after completing 2 games, I felt compelled to just try throwing fruits as fast as possible, randomly. When you do that, there are some delays but it's not clear if the delays are by design or simply due to lags. I did see lags, as the duck would just appear at a different spot as I was moving the mouse, so there is a hiccup there as a new fruit is created. I'd imagine that kids playing this game would find this "random" play style enjoyable. So, the lags kinda take away some of the fun - the gfx of the fruits are okay-ish though maybe a bit too flat-color - the UI presents all labels in both English and Japanese (?) which is noisy. Instead, there should be just a language switch, and single-language labels. Because what if the dev adds more languages eventually? I mean, in China or Russia few people know English, so you'd need at least those languages added at some point. Bad: - as a single-player game, and if you are an adult, the fun wears off after you complete it a few times. There is probably just not enough meat to keep you for longer. Of course one could say this just about any casual game, e.g. all games that people play on mobile phones - they are just too simple for a normal gamer to enjoy for longer than a few minutes. But at least those games have additional mechanics that get introduced all the time, at every next level. E.g. match-3 games have bombs, exploding rows, frozen tiles etc. I guess in this game there could be tons of similar stuff to liven up gameplay and make it more varied. It's an interesting concept and a good game with nice and funny presentation. It's certainly a buy if you have a child. Or if your gf/wife is a gamer and you bring your laptops to the same table/room. Still, it feels rather basic and could be improved with a same-screen multiplayer, more music tracks, more mechanics added, and maybe some single-player "campaign" mode where new stuff unlocks in every level. Also I guess "free with in-apps" would probably work better here, though I can't say off the top of my head what the in-apps could be. Going free would certainly help to fill up the online multiplayer population. [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]