Pull the pin

 

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Never pull the Cotter Pin! Pull the Pin

Today I bring you a game you've seen in every mobile ad on the internet. The classic 'pull the pin' for treasure. This is a very simple and fun little game to play. You have to pull out the pins and collect a lot of marbles. Sometimes you have to pull pins and remove obstacles before you can collect the marbles. Lastly, you run into marbles that are grey, you must have colored marbles touch these to turn them all colorful. All the marbles must be in color for them to count.

The basic game is to pull the pins in the right order to collect all the marbles like an 80s board game called Kerplunk, inside of a bucket. There appear to be hundreds of levels you can go through. There is one currency and it is coins. You earn coins from completing levels, completing challenges, or from houses that idly produce coins for you over time. 

Your first cosmetic unlocks are different marbles. Each time you buy one the price increases vastly. The game is fairly easy to earn coins in. You can watch ads and it gives you a major boost to get enough coins for the next unlock.

The next cosmetic that you find is the pins. These you can only unlock by playing enough levels then you are forced to watch a video to earn them. If you can't watch the video because of connection loss or no more loaded ads, you can come here and watch the ads later to unlock them. There are also themes that you unlock in similar ways. It seems my screenshot here got ate by the gear spiders.

Challenges unlock every 15 levels or so. You have to pay coins to be able to even try them for a chance to get double the coins back. So far all the levels in this game have been extremely easy and that could lead to boredom very fast.

When you complete the level, you get a preview of the pin or theme you are unlocking, an emoji at the top of the screen, and any daily challenges you beat. 

Now onto the idle elements of the game. You can use your coins to buy more and more houses that produce many coins when not playing. Now, I don't see the point for this as there is a very limited number of things you can buy with coins, and at that point, it seems like you are just trying to max out the total number of held coins. There is a level here for when you collect stars from building up houses. I do not see the point of this level as nothing affects it. Also, you must completely build up one home before you can buy a new one akin to Monopoly.

Lastly, you use coins to buy and upgrade the house but to upgrade the land and increase the coin production modifier requires you to watch Ads. 

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Overall:

 4 of 5 cogs.

The game is very simple in all ways. Someone finally made a game based on all the click-bait ads. I don't foresee many playing this game for too long before they get bored and move on to the next click-bait-based game.

Story:

 0 of 5 cogs.

The story you seek is in another steam tank.

Amount of ads:

 

many!

Not only is there a banner ad at the bottom of the ad, but a non-skippable video also plays after every level beyond 15 if I remember. Then you are forced to watch ads to unlock or progress through parts of the game. There is a remove ads button but I don't know how that affects the unlocks that require ads.

Accurate Advertising?:

💯%

This is a game that is featured in many click-bait ads and isn't click-bait. The video ads for this game are accurate along with the screenshots on google play.

Graphics:

 4 of 5 cogs.

This game uses very simple 3d images. They are flat colored and appear to have baked in shadows in the textures. This game follows the hyper-casual format with very simple assets and fast gameplay.

Gameplay:

 4 of 5 cogs.

Simple and repetitive gameplay. You pull pins in a logical way to collect all the marbles in a bucket. The idle element only adds a brief respite from the repetitive gameplay.

Free play:

💯%

This game is very much free to play. You have a lot of ads to deal with in exchange for no other micro-transactions that I remember.

Fun factor:

🍰 Easy as pie.

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