Genre: Puzzle Role-Playing
Website: http://marvel.com/games/161/marvel_puzzle_quest
Shane:
- Platform: PC
- Hours logged: 10.0
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: 4/10
- Platform: Android
- Hours logged: 20.0
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: 7/10
- Shane (2/25/2014): I love Marvel. It has consistently interesting characters and stories. I also love Puzzle Quest. I played the GBA version of Puzzle Quest for HOURS a number of years ago, far past when I should have moved on to better things. This game is a slam dunk for me.
Which brings us to something I find facinating. This game is garbage. Fucking vile. Don't get me wrong, I like the way you select the characters that you want to use for your fights and they have skills that are recognizable from the comics. I like the standard Puzzle Quest puzzle play and the new elements involved which seem to balance play pretty well. I even like the really bad little snippets of story, slid in awkwardly between levels. What is wrong with this title, however, overshadows all of that.
Microtransactions are destroying gaming.
I won't use this as a soapbox to give all of my views about micro-transactions. I don't want to put all of that down right now and I have typed most of it out elsewhere in long winded and angry walls of text. I CAN happily give examples here of how that mechanic RUINED this game for me.
Leveling in this game is done by collecting "covers" for comics. Each cover will level one skill from one hero. Most heroes have 3 skills, starting at 0 and leveling up to 5. There are a number of ways to gain these covers, including picking them up in the single player story mode. Now, I played a lot of the single player story mode because I LIKE single player story mode. I collected a lot of these covers, often for heroes I didn't have yet. This brings us to the "roster."
Your "roster" starts with one slot. You buy additional roster slots with the more rare of the in-game currency (there are two different types). You can then use the covers into the roster slots to gain the hero featured on the cover. If you get a cover with a hero you don't yet have, you buy a new roster slot and drop that hero into your list. Until you run out of currency. Then you have to play the right missions to get more until those run out, or if you place high enough in the PVP tournaments you can get a few more. Really, I understand this. I don't LIKE it but that is how the Freemium model functions, driving the time = money mechanic to it's logical conclusion.
What is NOT acceptable to me is taking the things I "earned" within the game away from me if I don't cough up currency for more roster slots. That is where this one goes off the rails. You collect covers and you don't use them for a week? You lose them. Poof. Let's say you did a one time mission and got that cover but didn't have a roster slot for the hero. Poof. Gone. Let's say you used some of the in-game currency to buy a random cover. Poof. Gone.
Now I am not afraid of buying games. I like it. Developers should be payed for their work. This feels dishonest to me though. Giving me the chance to work for something, giving me that thing, then taking it away from me after emotionally jerking me around with this count-down timer is manipulative and dirty. It killed the game for me.
I am sure I will go off again, later, about the different ways the Free To Play world makes a buck but this was enough to make me uninstall the game immediately, once I experienced that. I did play it both on PC and on Android and blah blah blah, Android was a better platform for the game but once my earned covers were stolen from me I didn't care about any of that any more. They lost me.
Bad form.
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