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[Anvilfolk]

A matching game with novel mechanics, mixed with a kind of tower defense, with lots of content, synergies between monsters, unlockables, progression, and legitimate tactical and strategic decisions! Also, great pixel graphics!

It's currently $3.20 on Steam, the dev is active, and I can't recommend it enough. It's definitely a gem in the rough, with it being hard to effectively use all the mechanics because the UI isn't the best, but it's damned addictive, the dev is active and seems to be a nice person who genuinely cares about the game, and takes feedback seriously. It's part time waster, part optimisation game, and it really sucks you in. In a good way?

Seriously, give it a try!

[Levi]

It sound cool, but man that screenshot makes it look confusing as hell.   I'll put it on my wishlist to get later though.

[nenjin]

I would try this were it not a gem game.

[Frumple]

Yeeaaah, looking at it, that's definitely the biggest barrier to my interest. Watching a vid or two shows it's not actually that complicated in game, but, well. The puzzle aspect is kinda' eh. More than anything my problem with it is definitely that it seems to distract from the... well, the interesting bits where your rooms and what they spew are actually doing things. Neat stuff'll be happening and you'll be down playing dr. mario, fantasy edition

E: Though that screenie looks a lot different from the vids I've seen so far. Maybe they're running off an older version? That side by side is a hell of a lot better than the scrolling design I've been seeing in actual gameplay. Still annoying amounts of juggling, but that'd help.

[Anvilfolk]

It sound cool, but man that screenshot makes it look confusing as hell.   I'll put it on my wishlist to get later though.

It ends up not being as confusing because ultimately once you've set up a room there's little point in keeping track of individual battles there. You mostly just try to make sure your monsters have abilities that work well together, and then you go back to gem-matching! There are quite a few concepts though, but you come to understand them eventually by playing and the codex.

Yeeaaah, looking at it, that's definitely the biggest barrier to my interest. Watching a vid or two shows it's not actually that complicated in game, but, well. The puzzle aspect is kinda' eh. More than anything my problem with it is definitely that it seems to distract from the... well, the interesting bits where your rooms and what they spew are actually doing things. Neat stuff'll be happening and you'll be down playing dr. mario, fantasy edition

E: Though that screenie looks a lot different from the vids I've seen so far. Maybe they're running off an older version? That side by side is a hell of a lot better than the scrolling design I've been seeing in actual gameplay. Still annoying amounts of juggling, but that'd help.

Yepyep, if you're not into gem games at all, then you might as well forget about this. The mechanics are still relatively novel though. Instead of just swapping two, you can do up to 4 moves at the same time, where you scroll a piece up/down/left/right. You can basically get any piece anywhere else, which allows you to build complex, big, huge matches. Incidentally, you also have an incentive to build weird patterns because achieving them gets you a higher resource cap, which is pretty useful!

And yeah, the new version just dropped. I think the dev is taking feedback about the UI seriously enough that we can expect it to become better eventually, though they said some changes might come sooner. We'll see.

[Tnx]

This game is fun, although there is definitely LOTS of things to manage and unless you pause to take a breather and look over everything.  Pausing though, lowers your end game score, which is really only for bragging on leaderboards and not much else.  I really like the legacy system, where your best monsters and certain "fortified" floors stay after you lose a round.

[Levi]

I ended up getting this, and yeah I think its fun.  I wish it had a manual or something though.

Does building floors accelerate the rate of incoming heroes?  Should I be just spamming down floors as fast as I can get them?

Edit:  Also, is there an easy way to refresh your tile grid with more tiles?  I noticed that building a new floor adds more tiles, but otherwise I have to wait for random stuff to fill up if I've emptied my grid.

[Anvilfolk]

I think the reason it doesn't have a manual is because the game keeps going through design revisions (which in my opinion keep improving the game). It just got a new patch that makes support abilities always happen - before that only the backmost creature on a floor would use the support ability, and they wouldn't attack! It felt a little meh.

I think the hero progression might be independent of your dungeon, but I'm not sure! Just progressively harder waves.

The way that you get tiles is by killing enemy heroes. There are also some creature abilities that I think spawn or automatically grab resources!

As you unlock more rooms, games start taking longer and requiring you to be more active all the time. You start not being able to defeat all of the heroes from each wave, so reshuffling heroes around to cope with heroes further down the dungeon becomes important. They also become more strategically interesting, since you get to decide which floors you wanna build, which branches out to all sorts of different creatures, which get you more things to unlock, etc.

[Levi]

Heh, yeah I ended up having not enough monsters to fight all the heroes on my second game.  None of my monsters were dying, they just couldn't keep up with the sheer number of heroes(I was trying to not build many floors that game). 

I look forward to trying it more after work today.  Seems pretty fun for the 3 or 4 dollars it cost me.

[Frumple]

... got it. Played a bit. Currently cheating like a mofo because because. One thing I've definitely noticed. Game needs some kind of indication when one of your critters get ganked like goddamn. Goddamn goddamn. Sound, some kind of message on the top scroll thing. A blink or flash or just about zogging anything other than a quiet move over on the side of the screen you're probably paying jack-all attention to.

Also kinda' have trouble figuring out why the hell there isn't one, because it took probably less than an hour to find it incredibly glaring that the game could use it.

Though checking the steam discussion it looks like it's planned for the next version, so there's that.

E: As for the tile refreshing thing, I'm not sure if it's actually a thing or just the impression, but it feels a lot like moving tiles around -- particularly dropping them levels, and particularly without actually making matches -- really jacks up the generation rate. Can get honestly kinda' frustrating when you're trying to clear Z-space for a new room and the freaking tiles won't stop falling from the heavens.

E2: It should probably be noted that, despite cheating a fair bit (infinite resources, basically), I'm still kinda' getting my ass kicked.

Also apparently you can lose by just having too much shit in your sanctum. Seems these heroes party hard enough to mosh down twenty+ stories worth of buried dungeon.

[Drakale]

It's kinda fun, but I honestly think they went a bit too far on the pixels. A tad more resolution on the images would make everything much clearer, especially the text.

Is it confirmed that moving the rows without making matches increase the hero spawn? Because that could explain why I get swarmed so fast sometimes, trying to line up some combo...

[ThtblovesDF]

It gets very chaotic, but I also enjoy the depth of design it brings to a simple prospect.

[Levi]

After playing it more, my only wish is a save game function.     Each game takes me like an hour and half to play.  Towards the end I'm cheering for the heroes so I can take a break.

Edit:  Wait, it DOES save when I quit.  Nevermind. 

[Anvilfolk]

It's kinda fun, but I honestly think they went a bit too far on the pixels. A tad more resolution on the images would make everything much clearer, especially the text.

Yeah, absolutely. People talked/complained about it, but the dev said it was pretty embedded into the design at this point and not super likely the change. This was a while back though, and the dev might've changed their mind.

[Drakale]

I found out way too late that there is a video option allowing for higher resolution fonts, much much better.