Here are my (very subjective) thoughts on the game.
Pros:
Interesting Concept
Fairly Polished
Surprising amount of depth
Cons:
UI
The UI feels clunky and unresponsive moving from the main screen to the left and right screens. This appears to be due to a common problem that occurs in mobile development: transitioning from a computer to an actual phone. On a computer, buttons make sense and the buttons are implemented beautifully. However, it is much more intuitive on a phone to swipe instead, and swiping between screens leaves much to be desired.
Rewards
The game has no real rewards system, meaning there’s no incentive to play. Sure, different tiles are nice, but having so many of them kinda devalues them and makes the player feel lost. Also, a lot of them look pretty bad (realistic pictures kinda clash with the stylized nature of the game). I would suggest the following to incentivize people to unlock more tiles:
1. Cut down on the number of tiles, or give players a way to choose what tiles they get.
2. Implement a rarity system in tiles so people feel a greater sense of accomplishment earning them.
3. Show the tiles in the shop/collection greyed out if I haven’t unlocked them so I can see them and anticipate/aim at getting them. Otherwise I’m basically getting random tiles out of the blue that I’ve never seen before, lowering the payoff.
Ads
There are far too many ads, and they are way too long. At the start, I lost to the AI in maybe 15 seconds. I then proceeded to watch a 30 second ad. This continues every single round and frustrated me severely- I definitely wouldn’t have reached the point where I could beat the AI before I uninstalled if I were a normal player. Either change to banner ads or reduce their length/occurrence, because they really then people off when they’re trying to learn game strategies.
Onto the actual game:
The gameplay, at its core, is essentially a more complex version of connect four. You try to build out until you can make a certain arrangement of tiles to make you win, and you generally do that by making your opponent screw up and not notice or by setting it up so that after they block, you can use their block to create another winning triangle/line. Obviously this game has no size limit and as a result will never force an end (like connect 4), and it also means that it gets increasing complex, adding another level of depth.
The fundamental problem, though, is that this model is only really fun when playing with a friend. The game does not have enough depth to encourage players to explore strategies in single player, like Chess or Go. This is compounded by the fact that there is only one AI difficulty, and once you’ve beat him you’re pretty much done with the game. As a result, the game had a very poor single player experience and doesn’t really serve as a time waster because of how little reason there is for someone to play it. You can’t really see yourself getting better, cause you only lose to the AI when you make a dumb mistake. You don’t get much from winning, since there’s a huge diluted pool of tiles. The game is very repetitive, since there’s only really one strategy (there might be more but no ones going to bother figuring them out). And there are far too many ads.
Another problem with the core gameplay is the ridiculous amount of calculation necessary. You can play Chess with mostly strategy and very little calculation, with stuff like blitz being fun because you can ease up on the heavy thinking. In this game, however, it’s really easy to instantly lose from overlooking something really simple, which means I spend most of each round scanning triangles to make sure my opponent can’t complete one. And once I got good at it, I pretty much beat the game. This is not fun. No one likes spending minutes analyzing, only to suddenly lose due to a dumb error.
The reason I gave this review 2 stars is because it is possible for the 2-player experience to be fun (I never tried it out though) because you’re actually competing against people instead of a dumb AI. Nonetheless there isn’t really any reason to choose this game over the more popular ones available, especially with the pitfalls I mentioned about single player, which are still present albeit mitigated by the fact that you’d be playing casually with someone you know.
Anyways, you need to improve in these aspects if you want to earn any money off this game. Good luck