Marvel Puzzle Quest

Yeah, thanks. I played a couple more matches, and figured most of it out. The way the game just dumps you into the first match is pretty bad though.

Where does it teach you the max-damage thing? Is there any indication which character will use which gems on the hero select screen? It appears not. I had Storm, Iron Man, and Hawkeye, and Hawkeye wasn’t on any of the icons. Only after Storm died did I see Hawkeye’s icon appear, so I couldn’t swap to Hawkeye at all.

The swipe to see gem-points is weird. There has to be a better way to display that information. The tap to see abilities is a little weird, too. That information should be condensed on one screen: here’s all your abilities.

The way the upgrades are handled is not that complicated, but it’s communicated very badly. I assume you need a cover and iso-8 to upgrade a power?

The UI is all janky, but for a preview / beta build, that’s okay, if annoying.

Also, the “feel” of the gems is so bad. They don’t have any satisfying heft to them when they slide. It’s such a minor thing, but it amazes me that so many games continue to get it wrong. The matching is weird in other ways too. The matches break in sequence, but they don’t fall in between, so you get some weird unsatisfying moments in between break animations where gems are just floating but not dropping, and then they break. I need to look at some other match-3’s to see how other games do this, but I think that all-breaking simultaneously, followed by letting existing gems cascade, followed by new gems cascading is the typical order?

It seems fine though, overall. I don’t have a match-3 that I play right now, so I’ll probably keep playing with it.

It seems that way to me, although I don’t recall that mechanic from other Puzzle quests. The game specifically called them “minions”, so maybe minions don’t get to match, but villains do.

I’m guessing it’s typical to fight a single villain with multiple minions later on, so they basically act as extra abilities for the villain.

I don’t know if you can determine exactly from before the match who will have the highest attack for a given color, but you can get a general idea from what level the character is, and the special attacks they have. Special attacks seem to trump level differences (my level 4 Storm gets black gems instead of my level 8 Iron Man), but I’m not sure if a large enough level disparity would change that. “Switching” to a character only matters for defensive purposes. Which are important, sometimes you need to be careful about who’s left in front to take the attack from your opponents turn, but on offense it doesn’t make any difference who’s in front. A given color match will always trigger whoever would do the most damage, and who’s on point doesn’t affect who can use their specials at all. You probably know this, but I just wanted to clarify.

You need a cover to unlock a power the first time, but after that, as far as I’ve gotten, you can always upgrade a power with just ISO8. Once you have the power unlocked, if you get the same cover again it’s more like just a “free” level increase for that power (unless you just bought it at random and are disappointed you didn’t get something new, obviously that’s not going to feel free at all).

You can, actually. Each character does different damage w/ different colors, and it seems to increase as they level up. It’s a bit hidden in the UI, but between matches you can bring up info on your heroes, including how much damage they do with gem types.

In theory, it seems you can optimize team composition by making sure you have at least one hero ability on each color, and probably making sure each color has a high-damage person covering it. But that’s a lot of work, and the closest I get is generally trying not to overlap the most powerful abilities on the same color.

It doesn’t teach this, that I saw. One of many things poorly communicated. Do check the environmental tiles. In many cases, if there’s a character that isn’t best at one of the colors, it will get credit for those.

It is weird, and unforgivable on the larger iPad screen. The UI is poor. If you get a junk cover, it takes six clicks to sell it. I also don’t see why the collection and training were split into separate places. In some places, you can click a power’s “ribbon” to go straight to it, but not in others, etc.

I don’t expect the UI to improve, honestly. I imagine we are stuck with it.

I think the feel of the gems is fine, personally. The important thing here is that while occasionally a swipe will register as a tap, I’ve only had a swipe register in the wrong direction once.

This is what I hate most about the game. If you have leveled up an uncommon character, then it will almost always have the best attack with most gems, meaning a board almost completely made up of a single hero’s icons. That character will also have the most life, too, but sometimes I’d rather throw a lower level character under the bus to save my uncommon (either because the uncommon’s special is key to victory or I don’t want to have to wait for the uncommon to heal to take on the next battle). Really wish there was a way to manually switch, at least a couple of times per match.

You can see this in matches, too, by tapping on the character portraits. This is especially key for learning about enemies you’ve never encountered before.

Anybody understand this cover “cache” thing? I got a cover after I’d used up all my slots. I wanted to use the cover to upgrade one of my heroes, so I sold one of my low-rent heroes to make room. I expected the cover that I had just won and “cached” to show up, but it didn’t. I just have an empty slot now. What’s the point of a cache if you can’t access it?

Justin, you can access it. I think the one time I did it, I had to go into the collection. Iirc there was a blue button that said cache on it. You then select the one you want to retrieve.

So can you use it for upgrades in the cache, or do you have to promote it to the main collection to do so?

Just a heads up- eventually iso isn’t good enough to upgrade powers. You need either a cover or gold coins.

What about levelling up? If I can’t use iso to level up than it’s bullshit.

Limiting power upgrades effectively limits leveling up too.

So, ideally, you’d save covers until later, but you can only keep them in cache for a week…

Well, to clarify a bit, I don’t know if that happens to the 1 star characters, but I was looking at my 3 star ragnarok, and sure enough, if I want to advance his skills I either need covers or gold. I assume it happens with other characters too.

Update today reduces healing kits from 6 to 4, which is still enough for my attention span so far, but lame. Also the phone status bar is directly on top of the game UI.

So to answer my own question, you have to have room for a cover in your main stash to use it as an upgrade component. Also, you have to start spending coins to upgrade your cover collection at 7. So any idea of collecting a sizable number of heroes without spending money is unrealistic, apparently. Looks like they went a little heavy on the cash grab on this one…no way is it going to hold my attention the way PAD has.

Noticed this sometime this evening and it greatly modifies my playing schedule (was trying to hit a couple of battles, heal using my kits, then a couple more before putting this down for a while to let my chars heal). And they changed my primary attack from Loki from something awesome ‘change green and yellow tiles to purple’ to some bloody stupid ‘change a couple of enemy Strike tiles to Protect’. Wasn’t expecting that and got my ass handed to me a few times before I realized I wasn’t doing something wrong but that the rules of the game changed. Bastards!

This game was featured in a live on-the-air intervention during this week’s Qt3 Games Podcast.

-Tom

You get gold coins just from playing too, so the limits on ISO-8 aren’t quite as bad as it first seems.

I’ve never seen Hero Points (gold coins) that you could get as anything other than one time mission rewards though. Seems like you could farm ISO-8, 20 at a time, forever. That’s what you get if you don’t get any rewards from a mission. Which is hugely impractical, but you could, theoretically, get all the ISO-8 you need, without spending money. Unless there’s a similar situation with Hero Points I just haven’t gotten to, then there’s a fixed amount of Hero Points attainable through just playing, and having no idea what that is makes me hesitant to spend them at all.

I realize it’s not the biggest mitigator, but you can get them from the time-based tournaments that rotate out every 3-4 days or so. With an infinite amount of time you’d have access to an infinite amount of coins, but of course it’s limited within a given timeframe.