Puzzle Forge: Become the most famous blacksmith and craft the best weapons of the realm!
The Tuesday Quest developers have done it again by making another fab puzzle game for fans to play! Check out what we thought of this game below.
Gameplay: Puzzle Forge is similar to Triple Town – you match 3 (or more) of a kind and then they’ll combine together leaving a new piece behind. The grid where you place your last mineral will be the square where the new object appears. The significant difference from Triple Town is the forging element: when two of the same ore are directly adjacent to a mould then they’ll be absorbed into the container. Once you put three moulds together then a weapon will be produced. These weapons can be sold to customers in your shop (at the top of the screen) to earn gold coins. However, the humans and orcs who come in are discerning clients who won’t just buy any object willy nilly – they at least need something which roughly suits their requirements. That means that you need to put particular combinations of blades, handles and hex-plates together to form swords, spears, axes etc.
This whole forging business is a very important part of the game and personally I think it makes it much more objective than Triple Town. For example, when a witch comes in and asks for a quality long rod then you need to take the time and care into refining your minerals and then forming three handle moulds together. Or there are also customers who need cheap and dirty tools to use immediately – overall it’s this type of demand and supply mechanic gives the whole game more purpose and meaning.
There are 10 weapon types to meld and there’s an achievements page where you can see how many of the 70 different weapons you’ve managed to craft. With the money that you earn from selling weapons you can upgrade your workshop and thus improve your ability to forge master weaponry. Speaking of money, you can get a big chunk of gold through an in-app purchase which also removes ads.
Graphics: The artwork is cartoony and cutesy making everything easy on the eyes and likeable (much like their previous game, Hungry Cat Mahjong). The clean and attractive feel definitely makes everything better for people playing the game. Animations are also excellent and they just make Puzzle Forge very polished.
Music and Sound effects: As soon as you start the game, then majestic historical music kicks in giving you a good feel and it gets you ready to play. Whilst you’re in the workshop though, the music is quite serene… it’s so calm that you could have thought that you were in an options menu! It’s only part way through whilst you’re racking your brains that you realise that actually the music is gentle and good to fill the void. It could be a bit repetitive, but as with all puzzle games you can play your own music and switch off the in game sounds. There aren’t any significant sound effects which is quite surprising actually. (We’re not entirely sure if its because of the Samsung Galaxy S2 test device we were using.) So we were quite disappointed because the sound effects were a much needed element to lift the game and reward players.
Interface: This is one area where things weren’t great. The main grid is fine. Unfortunately, when it comes to identifying the weapons that come in – there’s just something slightly unintuitive about the requests. I can imagine many people would be constantly tapping on the customers to find out what needs to be moulded together. Then the switching between the minerals and moulds is a bit weird… although I can see the developers have put effort into identifying things clearly, I feel as though the image of what you’re placing down should be shown near your finger when you touch the screen.
Other differences from Triple Town: The grid in Triple Town is 6×6, and Puzzle Forge has one row less – this feels like it makes a huge difference because your work area gets cramped very fast. Triple Town also has a move limit built into the game which encourages keen players to buy their game. Puzzle Forge excels here because it lets dedicated players play everything for almost free.
The other big mechanics differences are: i) the sequence of minerals provided, ii) the method of how minerals combine and, iii) how the combinations are shown. I really hate to compare too much, but this is something that Triple Town does amazingly well. In the early stages of Triple Town, it actually gives beneficial plants and helps players to survive longer. Also, when objects combine, they’ll merge with pieces which are on their diagonals as well as those horizontally or vertically aligned with them. Puzzle Forge doesn’t have this level of sophistication which means that you really need to change your mindset because you’ll often need to close your shop to reset the grid. Objects don’t combine diagonally and they don’t bounce out at you to clearly identify which pieces will merge. Puzzle Forge also has this hot furnace effect which prevents players from placing minerals on particular grid squares after a weapon has been made… all in all, this makes a very difficult game. It’s definitely not a survival game, and those who go in with that mindset would be very disappointed.
Rating: 3.5/5 Puzzle Forge is an excellent long term puzzle game. We’ve played it for days! Although it started off slightly confusing because there weren’t many explanations, it definitely grew on us and became more fun as we realised what we could do. It shouldn’t really be compared to Triple Town too much, but we would highly recommend this as a match-3 training game! In some ways it’s much more pure than Triple Town and it punishes you very harshly for any mistakes.
Puzzle Forge Promotional Video
Tips from Android Games Review
- You can see customers who want to buy quickly because you’ll see them sweating. If they’re not the first three in the queue then their demanding countdown won’t start. In order to deal with them better its more advantageous to be ready to serve the first three immediate customers first. So build their required tools, but don’t sell any until you have a product for all three customers. Then sell them slowly one by one and stop if you need to deal with urgent requests. In this way you can control the demand and serve people in a timely manner without sacrificing reputation.
- Moulds which are placed incorrectly will shatter and can’t be removed. It’s a very annoying part of the game. In fact, we started off putting loads of bad moulds down to see if they would merge together. The only tip we can give here is make your moves slowly so that you never incorrectly place a mould. This suggestion also extends to minerals!
- Shop purchases are always laid out and priced in a weird way. Generally, the more expensive item, the more worthwhile it is. So far we’ve bought the Extractor Upgrade and it’s definitely improved our minerals coming through. If you’re finding that you’re closing the shop to clear the work area very often (like us!), then don’t bother with the Dark Connections or Anvil upgrades.
Developers: Tuesday Quest
Puzzle Forge QR Code
(Click on the image or scan the barcode with your Android phone to goto Google Play)
