Match Land: Puzzle RPG 9+

I don’t keep games a long time on my phone because mobile games, especially ‘F2P’, are really disguised as money suckers.

Not the case with Match Land, you can play entirely without paying a penny. It hits all my requirements too. No PvP, Facebook login nonsense - just a good, single-player concept slightly more challenging than your typical match-3 games. I appreciate the fact that I can spend an entire afternoon playing or pass time in line quickly playing this and easily put my phone down from either. It’s definitely something I come back to everyday, even after months of playing. It’s almost reminiscent of old Pokémon, collecting your heroes and leveling them up without extra gimmicks like personalities or what time of day you train it.

For the record, I like this game way more than the CN version of it and I’ve already deleted that one. It felt too flashy in efforts to attract both kids and adults. While I did enjoy the addition of diagonal movements in CN’s Match Land, it wasn’t implemented well enough and it would wrongly swipe. The original Match Land is much more solid of a game. Thank you for the game and new update, Race Cat! It just keeps getting better with time. :)

Really can’t see where any of the reviews calling it a cash-grab are coming from. I’ve been playing for like 6 months now and I’ve never spent a penny. It’s not “absolutely impossible” to pass certain levels without spending money, it just requires taking time, leveling up your heros and multiple tries, you know, like a real video game? I’m a level 56, currently in the cursed swamp. I am too weak to beat the current boss, so instead of crying about it or spending money, I am going back to past levels to collect material to level up my heros until I’m strong enough. The arena of skulls challenges are the best part of this game, super fun and a great way to level up and collect material/currency. No bugs to report either. I’ll continue to play this game for a long time.

This is a quirky game with interesting mechanics and a great pixelated art-style that is fun at first but quickly loses its charm. This game forgets it's a phone app and becomes too ambitious as you progress in the game. For one, the board is very small, and with five different types of heroes in your party, it becomes extremely hard to make any matches. You start with one three hero types, which makes the game fun and exciting as you quickly make matches and combos. Then you're bogged down with two more heroes with different pieces that are added to the board. Gameplay slows down and difficulty inexplicably ramps up, despite the new mechanics thrown in. You can't remove any of these extra heroes from your team and the only way to get more heroes to get a more balanced team? You guessed it, pay money for gems for a chance to possibly get a new hero. That's it. The point where the game becomes no fun, unless you have say $50 to blow. Quite sad how little balance there is with the games mechanics. On top of all this, you can't simply replay old levels for fun of you already cleared them with 3 stars. You have to slog onwards through the harder levels, losing over and over until you slowly earn gold and build your team. But, no matter how much you level up your starter heroes, they are nothing compared to the pay to win epic heroes. So good luck with that.