Reviews

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

I had trouble getting mouse clicks to register on my computer. It would only select a tile about 70%-80% of the time I clicked and it made it very difficult to race against the clock.

Nevertheless, I was able to get past the first couple of levels. Good job!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

A fun, albeit simple, tile matching game.

The visuals are good (I like the kanji on the tiles and the falling snow in the background), the use of a time limit is enjoyable and instills eagerness (and perhaps anxiety) in the player, and the overall gameplay is fast-paced and requires a touch of strategy. I am not sure how pathfinding fits in to the game though.

My only suggestions for the game would be to write instructions on the screen using text, rather than using a dialog, and adding more levels.

All in all, it's a good game.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

This game is a matching puzzle. There are pieces of five different kinds scattered across the screen. Your task is to click them in matching pairs, then the matching pieces go away. You compete against a timer, and also have a health bar which decreases when you click a non-matching pair.

The rules are somewhat followed: the pieces have hieroglyphs on them, matching can be seen as crafting pairs, snow falls in the background, and there is an attempt at poetry in the Readme.txt file. The use of pathfinding rule is however not obvious.

Unfortunately, the game suffered from a few bugs. First, a mouse click seems to be registered on every tick until you release the button - instead of once on mouse-button-down or mouse-button-up, so you have to guess an odd number of ticks to actually click something. Second, the time expires too fast, maybe because mouse clicks decrease the timer too, and there are too many of them because of the first bug. I didn't encounter another bug mentioned in the developer's log.

The bugs are perhaps fixed with just a few lines of patches, but they do impair gameplay. I've played a version where the timer was more allowing, and it was a nice albeit straightforward experience.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by entheh all reviews by entheh

Lands of Magic is a stacked tile matching game featuring Chinese ideographs representing earth, sky, snow, water and fire. You are subject to a time limit, as well as a health bar which is depleted if you select tiles that don't match. Snowflakes drift downwards in the background and poetry appears in popup dialogues at various times.

This game was unfortunately affected by a couple of showstopper bugs. The author found one and posted a fix, and I found the other. Since mine affected timing, it seems likely that the 'fixed' game doesn't represent the author's intended difficulty level: the time limit is probably much longer than it should be. Therefore it probably isn't fair for me to judge the game as too easy, so I won't do that. It seems likely that with the right balancing, this game could be a very enjoyable frantic clickfest, so I am awarding a fair score in the 'overall' category.

The poetry is so embarrassingly bad, it's good. Rhymes are forced and in many cases don't even come close to actually rhyming. There is no consistent metre. Clearly this is just because our author's first language is French, which has a very different sense of rhythm and emphasis, and it does lend a certain charm to the game. It takes guts to publish such a thing, so I won't judge. Along with the inclusion of snow, this covers the artistic category.

Unfortunately since I saw no evidence of crafting nor pathfinding, I can't award points there. Apart from that, nothing stood out as excellent, but for what it is, it's certainly not bad. Bien fait mon ami !

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 1