Slime Evolutionary Path

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

Since I became sick, I haven't been able to sort out a new winner yet. The prize is still unclaimed, and thus this week I will pick a new winner from this week's Comments. Paypal only as Cashapp is temporarily off the table. To enter you MUST put a contact method in a comment on this blog post so I can contact you if you win. This is your second chance to win before the chance is gone. The prize is still $10. 

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The steam troops have spotted: Slime Evolutionary Path

The slime is the classic RPG monster that everyone knows. A recent meme in Anime and other places is this concept that a slime can evolve and become the strongest enemy there is. This game takes on that same meme where you take a small blue slime and grow it into a killing machine.

There are two different kind of currencies. Gold coins and the premium currency that is red diamonds. If you click on the Red Diamond button you can watch an optional ad to gain a few of these diamonds. It takes a lot of these to buy permanent upgrades or other objects that will be covered later in this blog.

When you click on the skill button you come to this screen. Skill 1 is what I will go over next. Skill 2 are special skills you hav to buy with the red gems. 

Here is the skill 1 button; Every 20 levels you can select a new skill. Each button gives you a set of two different abilities that you will gain if you select it. These skills can stack and become stronger if you lean the same ones over again.

If you click on the button of the grey slime button you can see all the skills you have unlocked so far. Some abilities only open up one you reincarnate several times.

As you unlock skills you can see what all skills you have equipped during this incarnation. You can click on each skill to get a description of what it does.

You can see alll the boosts you have at a glance here. I can not remember the exact way to get to this screen because the menu system is conviluted and not clear. 

When you click on the button with the yellow and blue stones you come to a sceen. As you battle enemies you collect stones that can be equipped. There is only 3 slots total. When you click onto one you can choose from any you have collected already.

Each gem has it's own level and they can have upto 4 skills. Each of these skills can go up to level 10. You can temporairly lock these or you can use gems to buy special orbs so you can keep one of these stones through a reincarnation.

There is a shop menu that is buried a bit. You cah buy more red diamonds using real money. This game is a generious with gems so you do not need to buy any gems to make progress in this game.

When you click on the gear you get a menu for all the options. You can pay to remove ads from here or you can check on the various other setttings here. You can replay the tutoarial here or enable cloud saving.

You can gain additional gems for logging in everyday. The game seems to reset at midnight based on your device's local time.

If you purchance anything you get these one time bonuses that you keep. Some of these are very rare and possibly unique abilities. As you can see, you have to purchase quite a bit of gems to get these.

This is the main game screen you will see a lot of. As you gain levels, you earn AP which can be distributed between hp, attack and defense. I haven't figured out the best way to distribute points yet as the enemies scale up in strength very rapidly.

When you are in the battle field, you can navigate to the idle menu. Here you can increase how many gold coins you get per hour, or experience. This is the main idle mechanic in the game, but there is a limit so you must also spend these gold coins to increase the offline limit. These upgrades seem to be a constant through all reincanrnations.

Now we come into the Skill 2 button. Here are permanent upgrades that you can buy but there is a limit to how many you can have active starting off. 

Lastly some of these skills are temporary boosts as well. The first couple of options are consumable options that will just eat away your diamonds.

Overall:

 3 of 5 cogs.

Overall, this game is mostly a meme. It has a couple of interesting skills but the menues are hard to navigate and to remember where everything is located. There isn't anything concrete here tha will keep you playing to too long.

Story:

 2 of 5 cogs.

There is a little bit of a story but I can't say it's original. It heavily borrows from anime and other memes with slimes in them. I leave it up to you how much you buy into the story.

Amount of ads:

 

 low

There is a lot of optional videos you can watch to gain premium gems. If I remember, you get a video every time you reincarnate to start all over again.

Accurate Advertising?:

💯%

I do not recall seeing any ads for this game. The screenshots on gooogle play are accurate but they are partially covered over by a charachter that blocks most of the images, which in turn is kind of misleading.

Graphics:

 3 of 5 cogs.

The graphics have a loose anime based style to them. The monsters does help boost the raiting a bit as they are highly detailed but beyond that I don't feel it was enough to raise the bar any.

Gameplay:

 3 of 5 cogs.

Game play is middle of the road. There is a few small things you can do but the game mostly plays its self. You have the option of changing what stones are equipped but other than that, you are just watching this game.

Free play:

💯%

You can earn premium currency while you play by logging in daily or watching videos. You do not have to pay anything into this game to advance through the game.

Fun factor:

😐 average and middle of the road.

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.

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Solitaire Dragons

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

Burt Price has not contacted me for winnings. If I do not hear back by the end of Monday, January 31, A new winner will be picked. Cash app is temporarily off the table due to a bank connectivity error. Paypal is the only way to win at this moment.

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The airships have found rare dragons eggs in: Solitaire Dragons

Today I bring you a very fast and simple game. I won't take too much time to go over things as Solitaire is a pretty standard card game that most people know how to play.

A quick reminder of how the game works is a goal of moving all the cards into 4 separate piles of all matching suit. You move cards around the board by moving an opposite color but lower notation card ontop of the higher card. You can only place cards in descending order and you can never put a higher level card next. You can also double tap a card and it will move it from where ever it is to an 'legal' move be it to the ace pile or to a play stack. Once you have the board solved, all cards automatically move to the ace piles for you.

You unlock gold coins for beating levels. As far as I can tell you can only win 10 coins per game you win. Sometimes you can't win a solitaire game and have to replay from the start.

You get to ollect many random presents for playing daily. When you get a coin day, you have a chance to watch a video to gain a boost to your coins.

As you progress along and grow levels you get access to dragon eggs. Each one costs coins to buy and then takes time to hatch. As far as I can tell these are just small little pets thast get added to the game that doesn't really change anything for the game except have animations of a pet dragon as you play.

You can only hatch one egg at a time at the start of the game. You can pay coins to buy new slots to expand the number of eggs you can have hatching at one time.

Lastly you can buy coins if you really want that rarer dragon but you still have to play a lot to be able to unlock them all anyways.

Overall:

 3 of 5 cogs.

Overall this game is average in every way. It doesn't have any flaws or glitches that I've found but it doesn't really do anything more for Solitaire except for adding an on screen kind of pet. 

Story:

 0 of 5 cogs.

Nope, no story at all unless you look up the history of the person that created Solitaire.

Amount of ads:

 

 many

After you get past level 5 you start to get a video everytime after you complete a playthrough. To avoid this you can play with airplane mode on.

Accurate Advertising?:

80%

This game is one that has been shown a lot the past few days again. The ads for this game does try to hype up the dragons and act like they help you in a game. They literally do nothing special.

Graphics:

 3 of 5 cogs.

The graphics are average quality art that could possibly be found in any asset library. There isn't anything that sets the graphics apart or make them memeroable. 

Gameplay:

 3 of 5 cogs.

This is a solid game that will keep most people that play solitaire happy for some time. It is the same classic version of the card game you can find anywhere. The ads can become annoying sometimes as well but as I've recommended before you can play in airplane mode.

Free play:

💯%

You can play as much as you want for as long as you want. There is no energy or other things that make you stop playing every few seconds. This is a game you can play stress free when you have any spare time.

Fun factor:

😐 average.

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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Merge Inn

 

Greetings mechanics and tinkerers!

Congrats to Burt Price. The blogpost hit 161 views as of the posting of this so you are the winner. As a reminder, I sent you a reply in the last blog post. Please contact me or let me know how I can contact you for your $10 reward. Thanks, everyone for the views and comments!

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Note: I do not have control over the number of ADs placed on this blog. It is an automated process and I've noticed that there have been a large number of ADs displaying and inturrupting my blog on Mobile devices. I will see If I can do something about lowering the number of ads if at all possible.

Take a seat and wait while the steam boiler cook up a meal at: Merge Inn

Today I bring you a very simple merge game. This one is food themed and so far out of all the merge games I've played, it doesn't hard sell you to buy land or other oddities. There are many micro transactions in the game as well as a couple of free daily. There are a few things to keep track here. The purple bar is your level. As you progress along the level you gain items that help you merge and create new foods. Energy is something in every game of this genre, though this game has a cap of 100 energy that can be recharged, it does recharge much faster than any other game of this time. Next is coins. This is the main currency you will use to expand your inventory space. Once you max out this space you can use the coins to buy energy tanks that give you a chance to refill your energy faster. Lastly is the premium currency the every popular blue diamond. This can also buy you 5 upgrade slots at a time (beyond the max buyable by coins.) or they can be used to buy other items you need, reduce time for item generators. There are many uses for these gems, note, in a recent update you can now use them in a new daily mini-game that replaces the daily spin wheel.

The blue chech is a milestone check you unlock by reaching the different levels. You collect this to give you some items you need to progress through new challenges in the game as you beat levels. 

As you complete orders (levels) you gain a star that is used to open this chest. This chest gives you even better rewards and needed items to progress through the story.

When you click on the shopping cart, you open up the shop menu. You can collect free piggy banks here that give you coins every day. Note that the dail-spin wheel is no longer an option and a new daily system is in place (not screenshots available.) From here you can buy missing foods or things you need to progress faster.

The second button on the bottom of the screen is the Collections button. This page shows you all the items you have ran across in the game and with that it will give you rewards for every stage you complete. The boxes with colored question marks are levels that give you blue diamonds instead of coins for unlocking them.

The scroll button brings you to side jobs. These are missions that rotate out every couple of days and gives you a lot of things to do if you have spare energy from waiting for all your item producers to refill. The rewards can be very minimal for the effort you put in.

Options screen and settings is the last button. Nothing fancy here.

Here is the main screen. You start off with very limited space and you have to merge items together to start opening up the play field. As you level up this playfield neven expands. Because of this you will use the storage drawer to hold things you don't need yet or completed items you have to hold onto to fill orders.

You start off with 5 spaces in the storage area. You can spend coins or diamonds to expand this space. The price to buy a single space goes up exponentially. I have yet to find the maximum number of slots available to buy. There is a bug where when I updated to the current patch, that all the spaces I bought were removed, and I got the coins back for the amount I spent. I think this was because there was a cost rework for these slots.

Here are the orders. Random residents of this area will visit you with speccific requests. Once you complete them you get experience, a star, and various items that help you unlock better equipment to produce foods from.

Lastly, when you complete every order on the list you get puzzle pieces. These give you a small preview of the new items you will unlock in the future. As you do so the main screen will also change to this picture once you complete all the pieces.

Overall:

 5 of 5 cogs.

I am very suprprised by this game. It is very gernerous and this is one of the rare few merge games I acutally want to work to unlock everything in. Its a relaxing game where you don't have to focus on doing some limited time events to get everything. You just play when you can or let it idle and recharnge and you can play all day.

Story:

  0 of 5 cogs.

To be fair, there is no actual direct story here but there is a very loose one with the charachters in the game and the progression of levels. There isn't a deeper meaning unless there is some hidden lore in each picture you unlock.

Amount of ads:

 

 only optional

You have a chance to watch some optional ads for only a couple of small things. There is a very limited number of chances to watch ads so you really don't want to stay online unless you watch ads to refill energy on reduce timers on item producers.

Accurate Advertising?:

💯%

I have only ever seen this game advertised once in a video Ad. From what I remember and the screenshots shown in the store, there is no clickbait. It is 100% legit game that doesn't try to push you hard to spend money.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.

The graphics are HD cartoons that remind me of early 90s cartoons. This game has a nice and relaxing style and the food will make you hungry. Do not play this game on an empty stomach!

Gameplay:

 5 of 5 cogs.

Byfar the best merge game I've played. It is chill and relaxing to play. There is no stress of what to do, you get ample space to do everything if you focus on orders one at a time. Due to randomness, you sometimes complete later requests due to some of the item producers creating 2 different branches of items.

Free play:

💯%

Very much so. This game is very generous to you and you can play as much as you want without hitting a paywall. This is a game I highly recommend to try out and play. Any one can easily play this game and make progress in it.

Fun factor:

🐭 Full of animals.

What can I say? I enjoy games that feature non-human charachters.

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.

Or you can donate with CashApp at:  #HakuzoSionnach.