Score: 6
"A great idea that turns out to be a little boring."
date: October 12, 2008
When I first started the game I didn't really understand how to play, but I usually don't read the instructions when I start a game because I enjoy discovering the controls by myself. So this game does have a slight learning curve, but once you do realize how to play it seems very simply.
Now let us discuss the difficulty concerning with Merge. I think Merge got too hard too fast, but the fact that you gave a couple easy levels at the start was a good idea to get the player on the right foot (Especially, the fact that you gave me a freebie puzzle at the start to help learn). This could have been attained faster though by including a main menu screen. This was the first thing that puzzled me at the start because usually most games start you off with a short movie and/or the main menu.
Something that bothered me every time was getting a game over and then a little pop-up coming up telling me to submit my score to the leaderboards. Some people will want to use that, but when others don't they have to keep clicking the close button every time they die to get back to the game.
Now the biggest concern was how repetitive and boring the game stayed. Changing a couple aspects of the puzzles every now and then was a nice refresher, but the game play stayed pretty boring and stale. Which is why some games introduce different obstacles or puzzles in the way to keep the game interesting and most importantly fun. I see you did try to implement this with the different puzzle images and a timer which gets a bit faster requiring you to speed up, but that only frustrated me.
Anyways, the game idea is very innovative, but the only big problems I see is the lack of a main menu and the tediousness of the whole thing is.
