Stone Miner

 

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Today the steam-rollers are loaded up with: Stone Miner

Today I have a fast and quick blog for you. Today is a very simple game where you control a steam-roller and have to chop away rocks. There is no title screen as this game sends you straight into the game. You have to clear away most of the level to get 3 stars. The further away the stones are from the dock, the harder it is to break the rock. Overall, this game is very chill and relaxing.

Once your cart is full you have to drive back and sell the stones. You use these coins to upgrade the vehicle to be stronger or faster. If you want you could potentially upgrade everything with out actually playing the game by watching videos. I wouldn't recommend doing this as this game is so easy. At some points on the map you will find a mine cart that you can load up and it sells for you but you must use emeralds to buy it or watch a video. As you progress you unlock more buildings. A pet shop allows you to buy and upgrade pets that give you some buffs. These pets use emeralds to upgrade as well. Lastly is a factory which I have not open up yet.

There are about 20 some maps right now. You can work to get 3 stars and these will be used later on. There are rarely some events as well that show up, currently is halloween and it has a time-limit of how long you can play in the levels to earn pumpkins. (No screenshots for this event, sorry.)

Now you may be wondering what all these stars do; They allow you to buy buildings on your own personal island. You can then earn emeralds that are used to buy cosmetics for your vehicle. These are a premium currency but it's nice to see its farmable. Oh and you can choose a color for your building after you place it. You can only change the color of the last building placed though.

Lastly, a quick shot of the shop. Daily you get 3 free emeralds for just playing. This game is very generous for being a F2P with microtransactions. This is a nice game that removes a lot of the toxicity around this genre of game.

Overall:

 4 of 5 cogs.

This is a nice and relaxing game where there is no pressure at all. Once you get everything completed in the main game it looks like the events are pushovers. This is a great F2P game that you can easily play anytime you have a few minutes. It can be played offline but progress doesn't save properly.

Story:

 0 of 5 cogs.

Your story is on another island.

Amount of ads:

 many

The one downside is the number of ads you see or have to view. There is a banner ad on the bottom of the screen that displays all the time. You have many optional ads you can watch and sometimes you get a forced video ad during certain parts of the game. Other than that, the ads are fairly tame compared to most games like this. It is chill about trying to force you to spend money and it is refreshing to see that.

Accurate Advertising?:

💯%

Yup, the videos for this game is straightforward and no clickbait here. 

Graphics:

 4 of 5 cogs.

The graphics are very simplistic and only flat colored 3d objects. Some of the cosmetics are better looking than other games in this genra.

Gameplay:

 4 of 5 cogs.

A simple game that anyone can easily play and complete. This game is relaxing to play at any pace.

Free play:

💯%

No need to throw your hard earned cogs around for this one. The game is very generous to you and you can earn everything in a fairly short time of play.

Fun factor:

🏭 contstuctful.

Are you an indy programmer or game dev?

If so, you can leave a comment or contact me on social media for a chance to have an interview with you posted to my blog. I am looking for many devs that focus on mobile programming. If you have a cross-platform game, that is fine too as long as it's on mobile.

Thank You for reading my blog. Please consider donating to the tip jar as these are tough times and every bit helps. You can get updates by joining my newsletter. If you enjoy these reviews please show others this blog by retweeting or liking my posts on social media.

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Mergical

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

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Merge the pipes together with: Mergical

This game is a clone of Mege Dragons or Merge Magic. There are two main currencies, gold coins and purple diamonds/gems. This game uses a fairly well known mechanic that can be found in may games. The whole point is to merge 3 or 5 identical items to make them merge into a strong item. The average level of items go up to near level 10, which means that it can take hundreds of level 1 items to get that high up the merge chain. You eventually get many creatures that will harvest things for you, (or just get in the way.) One of the items you merge up produces these sound notes called Arias, and are used to clense grey land.

Along the left of the main map screen you see several tasks. When you complete them you get some very minor rewards. Sometimes you get more companions to help you clear stuff. Which brings me to the clouds. Each one requires having a certain number of points to be able to clear them. When you do only a few squares open at a time. At one point the  number of points it takes to clear out the clouds is very insane. Not pictured in a screenshot are land masses you must pay at least 20 USD a piece to unlock, these are very steep paywals.

As you progress on you can see all the items you unlocked and each stage of it. When you claim it you generally get only 10 coins. Some special ones do give a couple of gems as well.

Down in the bottom left is a button that brings you to the puzzle missions. The rewards for these are not really worth it, but if you beat a mission for the first time you get a chest with some goodies and if you collect enough stars you get a slightly better reward.

Here is the example one of the map. These maps are small and have very limited items to deal with. As you progress the tasks become more complex and require more thought to solve.

Everytime you complete a mission you get 3 free rewards but you can pay gems to get slightly better items but still are not worth the diamonds.

Overall:

 2 of 5 cogs.

This game is riddled with so many paywals that make this game so hard to play. These kind of games are just not fun when you have to pay money just to make a single match or to get decent progress. Then there is the matter of not having enough space for the numerous things you must merge at once. Sadly this game suffers from the poor designs that I've seen so many merge games fall into.

Story:

 0 of 5 cogs.

Nope, none.

Amount of ads:

 low

There are many optional ads you can watch for various rewards at times. There are some pop-ups that try to get you to buy what ever event is going on at that day. Lastly there is a forced video ad that plays when you complete a puzzle missions.

Accurate Advertising?:

1%

Yeah, no. The screenshots on google play only partially match the actual game. There are assets and things that are shown that do not exist in the game at all. I can not remember the videos I've seen but those were mere accurate than the blatant clickbait on the store.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

Arguably the only good thing about this game. The game has many HD assets that do have a nice astetic and does have a design more geared to female audiences. Though the HUD does seem to have generic art found in any game like this.

Gameplay:

 3 of 5 cogs.

The game is a bit buggy and objects will move when you don't want them to. The game gets boring rapidly while you wait for your helpers to wake up. Overall this game does not have anything new but paywals to it and is a let down of a merge game.

Free play:

30%

There are way too many paywalls that make this game hard to get into or want to continue to play. With the amount of paywalls there is no need for so many advertisements. This is a very greedy game and can not rely on its own mechanics to support people to by the game items without forcing it on them.

Fun factor:

💲 Cash grabby

Are you an indy programmer or game dev?

If so, you can leave a comment or contact me on social media for a chance to have an interview with you posted to my blog. I am looking for many devs that focus on mobile programming. If you have a cross-platform game, that is fine too as long as it's on mobile.

Thank You for reading my blog. Please consider donating to the tip jar as these are tough times and every bit helps. You can get updates by joining my newsletter. If you enjoy these reviews please show others this blog by retweeting or liking my posts on social media.

Throw a cog(tip using PayPal) to your blogger.

EZPZ Saga

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

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The mechanical troops march up with: EZPZ Saga

The game that I will be reviewing today is a semi-clone of AFK Arena. This game suffers from the exact same problems as AFK Areana and that you have random gotcha pulls for troops and you get a flood of unusable commmon troops that drain away your storage space. I had high hopes for this game but I was instantly put off by the burnout I sufferred from these kind of games.

When you you start up the game, you are given several troops as a start.You must then let them fight idly to level or you click on the attack to take on the level's boss. You have to do this every time to progress as I did not see any form of auto-advanced for this part of the game.

The game also features a season pass that has one set of free rewards and then paid rewards. Not only do you have this paid content, you also have several more microtransactions you can pay to progress more. This game is very much pay to win and just has many systems to drain money from you.

Back on the main screen when you click on the scroll in the top right of the screen you get this menu with several places to go and collect diffrent things including the previous screenshot with the season pass. Some of these screens I cover in the following screen shots, but there is a lot of hidden little rewards you have to find and scout for. These screenshots will be a bit all over the place as this game is very chaotic and it is very complicated to figure out what to do.

Another set of daily to weekly quests can be completed to earn varius rewards. These appear to be temporary quests for new players to do as a kind of catchup mechanic.

Another random timed even can be done to unlock a rare unit to help power up your team. These missions are very difficult as it requires many gotcha spins to complete them. I feel this is another poor attempt to force players to pay money just to get a possibly useful troop, but by the time you finish getting the required gotcha pulls you may have better troops anyways, making this quest feel quite useless.

Next Is the daily tasks that you can do to get the premium currency of these blue diamonds. I have not played long enough to see what these premium currencies can be used for beyond buying more spaces for troops.

We finally make it to the main screen. You can see a constant chat window that can not be closed off. In the middle of the screen you can watch the idle battle going on while you sit back and do nothing but wait. Right now the textbox in the top middle is covering up the button you have to click on to advance to a new area after taking on the area boss.

You click on the the player picture in the top left and you can see various options in the game. You can also change the music that is playing during the idle screen. This is the most unique thing I've seen done in any of the games.

Moving along when you click on the Line-up button on the bottom of the screen you can choose which troops to use and change thier battle positions. The problem with this game is every once in a while the enemies force you to change the positions as they can sometimes attack the back row first.

You can then click over to the charachter button you can focus on upgrading several aspects of your troops. Now the first troop you get is the main 'hero' and has additional buffs that you can train as you slowly level up the main account. There is many things you can power up here as well as attacks or stats.

Here is the list of the talents you can unlock. as you can see there there are several tabs at the bottom of this box that you can put points into. There is a lot here to decide and plan on as you progress through the game.

Here you can see each skill takes a certian number of skill points to unlock, I feel that an initial skill costing 2 points to unlock is very steep and in order to unlock skills further down the board you have to buy skills above it. I do not know if it is possible to unlock all the talents if you play enough or if you can even reset the skill tree.

Other units have a level of trust with the main hero. As you play along you can interact with the units to unlock stronger permanent bonuses for that character. Each one of these seem to take a unique resource to open up thes bonuses.

The ever growing need to find all the rarest equipment you can cram on a unit and then having to upgrade all of those pieces for even more stats. This game has several set bonuses from armors that all fall into that same set. This makes it even more complicated to find the right equipment for each unit to use.

Lastly, there is a special gotcha that you can roll to try to get rarer units easier but it takes a lot of a harder to obtain resource. These seem to be weekly events that change up and I do not know if these have improved rates or not.

Overall:

 1 of 5 cogs.

Overall, I am not happy with how this kind of game is contstructed. There are no ads but there are so many paywalls where you have to pay just to even catch up with other players. It is only possible to catch up with a lot of grinding and hoping all the top players become inactive long enough for you to close gap. There are many flawed things with this style of game that just leads to toxicity. I've had many bad experiences with this kind of game, that is more akin to gambling disguised as a game.

Story:

 3 of 5 cogs.

There's a fair bit of story as you progress through the story. There is an attempt at some comedy but it just doesn't rub well with me.

Amount of ads:

 

 None, there are no Ads because of the heavy paywalls.

Accurate Advertising?:

75%

I've seen several ads for this game and none of them were accurate enough to show this game is just a clone of AFK Arena. The ads made me think this game would be a different kind of idle game but no it was severely disappointing.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

Arguably the best part of the game. All the art is HD and packs quite the punch to the storage of your phone.

Gameplay:

 1 of 5 cogs.

What else can I say? I was highly disappointed by this game. I was expecting something different and instead it was a carbon-copy of other types of games just like it that have many flawed systems designed to steal money from your wallet. The odds of getting decent troops would equate to lot of money to keep rolling gotchas. 

Free play:

10%

Just, no. This game is not very kind to f2p gamers. This game has many traps to make you spend large amounts of money with little to no actual value in return.

Fun factor:

😔 Disappointed.

Are you an indy programmer or game dev?

If so, you can leave a comment or contact me on social media for a chance to have an interview with you posted to my blog. I am looking for many devs that focus on mobile programming. If you have a cross-platform game, that is fine too as long as it's on mobile.

Thank You for reading my blog. Please consider donating to the tip jar as these are tough times and every bit helps. You can get updates by joining my newsletter. If you enjoy these reviews please show others this blog by retweeting or liking my posts on social media.

Throw a cog(tip using PayPal) to your blogger.