What about the plethora of reviews that say the opposite?
Piyo Blocks 2 and Push Panic are completely different animals compared to this. Dungeon Raid is incredibly Spartan and the pace is a bit slow, but it obviously was designed by someone who has a good grasp on how to craft a compelling game.
The big difference in the gameplay here is that you connect together chains of items (linked vertically, horizontally, or even diagonally) that all disappear when you lift your finger up. There aren’t many items – just shields (increase your defense), potions (restore health), coins (give you money), swords (do damage when linked to skulls), and skulls (enemies that do damage if left on the screen after your turn).
You level up as you kill stuff, which lets you pick a number of spells that work on long timers (only available every 14+ turns) as well as perks that provide passive bonuses. Collecting enough money automatically brings up a shop window that lets you upgrade your weapons, armor, and trinkets. Skulls get tougher as the game progresses, but there’s a nice balance between that and your perks.
The neat thing about the game is that board control is increased over most match-X games because of the spells and the fact that you can link chains diagonally. That latter design decision is huge, as it lets you easily set up long, powerful chains. Spells do things like let you change all of one item into another item, or immediately grab all of one type of item, or boost stats tremendously for one turn (among lots of other things).
The graphics are crisp, and the sounds are fantastic. The latter give that sort of ‘gamer casino’ vibe that crappy games lack. A number of stats are tracked and listed when you die, so you can get a little hall of fame going, and there are three difficulty levels. Unlike a lot of other games that cram a lot of tiny icons onto the screen I haven’t had any trouble with the controls.
I’m pleased I bought this. The game does precisely what I’d hoped it would do (albeit at a slower pace for upgrades than I’d prefer) and is an elegant diversion that fills a void left when I burned out on Puzzle Quest. It sounds like the dev is preparing an update that adds different abilities to the generic skulls so they can fight back in more interesting ways than simply doing damage, which is awesome because this is one of those games that makes you think about all the possibilities that could easily be bolted onto the tight, simple core mechanisms. I haven’t been this impressed by an iOS game from a design perspective since playing Sword & Poker (although I was more impressed by Sword & Poker).
