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Showing 3 reviews for Drakes. all reviews

Drakes
by Gassa
all reviews of Drakes

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

Ouch... my finger hurts from playing this game...

Drakes is an interesting twist (I don't play these games I don't know how novel it is) on the marble matching games that are so common. A constant stream of crud falls from the sky and you need to make it dissapear by clicking it... sometimes when you click on things a dragon appears and if you pay close attention you'll note that that happens the number of things that disappears is prime. I first noticed it when I clicked 29 bones an a dragon appeared, but when I clicked 35 threads it did not... just kidding, it's impossible to count how many items are in the group and hope to win in such a fast paced game. It's an interesting idea but it just doesn't mesh with the game itself. Even ignoring the dragon bit (I think it just increases your score?) there is no real strategy in this game. My best score was gotten by simply constantly clicking on the items without regard to the number of items that would dissapear from my click. If I see a column that's too tall, I click up and down it and it dissapears. Otherwise I just go side to side across the rows. It's unfortunate that this brute force strategy is so effective, because otherwise this game idea has some potential.

The graphics are very good. It's too bad that the game doesn't have sound though... not even a tune to keep your mind of the endless clicking.

Overall it's a nice game for the genre, I think. Nothing in it really made me angry at it, so that's a plus.

The TINS rules are touched upon, but there's nothing too spectacular happening. The prime usage, as I mentioned above, is interesting but has to be ignored for you to have a chance of winning. I liked how parallax scrolling showed what all those tiny items are supposed to be, a nice touch. Anachronism was not implemented too well, I thought.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 2

Review by darkbits all reviews by darkbits

I guess this game can best be described as some kind of Bejeweled-like puzzle click'em'up.

Technically it seems to be pretty solid. No bugs to be found, except that the play widow didn't seem to appear on my laptop, but that seems to be the case for all A5 entries in this compo for some reason.

The graphics are of a very nicely hand drawn style. I really liked how smoothly the pieces fell down from the top of the screen.

Sadly, the gameplay gets boring pretty fast. It's a bit too fast paced to make any strategic play possible, frantic clicking is the way to go. However, with some tweaks I could see myself playing a game like this on my phone when waiting for the bus. A smaller playing field to limit the number of choices at any given moment could possibly make the game a bit more interesting.

The genre requirement (creative anachronism) is cleverly implemented by having representing game pieces as inventions from different epoch. I only made it to level 3, however, so all I saw were the old-timey ones.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

This is a fairly nice and smoothly animated bejuweled-type game. Click on a block of matching items to make them disappear. Sometimes drakes appear when you click, and it wasn't too clear to me what they do. From reading other reviews, it appears that the drakes have something to do with prime numbers. I guess that is the prime and dragon rule implemented. Parallax scrolling is there, and the items range from prehistoric bones to computerchips, so the anachronistic theme is there too. Nothing major, but it's all there. I think the implementation of the prime numbers rule could have given this game that little extra bit of originality, if it was made more clear what was going on exactly.

Trying to play this strategically worked very well in the first level, and I managed to get such a large block of spools of thread that I was immediately propelled to level 3. But on higher levels it seems that the random clicky strategy is the best, and that hurts replay value a bit.

A decent entry, but it doesn't really stand out.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 2 Technical 3 Genre 2