Royal Match 4+

It’s a really engaging game. Looks nice, the animations are nice and there is a lots of blowing up stuff. Candy crush never attracted me, and even though it’s almost the same thing, it somehow has a better gameplay. Maybe it’s the more various board layouts or the varying challenges.
And a really great thing for me that it’s not pay to win. It gets quite hard after about stage 150 and I thought it will be impossible to continue without buying stuff but now I’m at stage 680 and haven’t spent a cent so far. Sometimes it’s slow but with luck, patience, using the power-ups sparingly - and of course with an okay strategy -, it’s doable. I will probably buy something in it just to send the devs something after spending all this time in the game - you can see there is a lots of thought and work in it.
Also it was a nice surprise to see there is no ad whatsoever because usually the average game is loaded with unskippable ads nowadays - those get deleted after half hour.
One negative to mention is that the button to spend ‘gold’ after a lost round looks exactly the same as the ‘continue’ button after a winning round. It’s clearly there to lure you into spending gold and I pressed it several times in a hurry. I get it, you want players to run out of gold and having to buy it but it just makes me angry and not want to give you money if I feel that I’m being cheated out of it.

I do enjoy this game. However, two things really bug me. First, this advert with the attempt at saving the king from peril was the thing that got me playing. I have done almost 700 levels and only had ONE of these type of challenges so far!

Secondly, the price for the coins for say one extra move is £1.79... which gets you 1000 coins - 900 coins buying you 5 extra moves - on really hard levels you need help, but may only need like one move. But then those 4 other moves that you've technically paid for, get lost. £1.79 per move is pretty expensive imo.

I'm in a team who are pretty active but you can only store 10 lives and there's a limit on how many times you can ask your team makes fir extra lives on something like every 3 hours, so on a really hard levels you have to stop playing for a few hours before you can try again once your lives are replenished naturally.

Right from the off let’s get one thing straight. This is a game of luck, skill is not really required. Other than knowing how to make the most basic of moves and using a little smidgen of brainpower, sadly the rest is going to pure luck. It is a match three game and is utterly dependent on the pieces that are delivered to the board, of which you have no control over. So that smug feeling that you have when you win the a round soon becomes a hollow feeling after several rounds.
Beyond this the levels are WAY too short as is the number of moves allowed, which means that if you attempt to play with any long-term plan or skill or strategy you are instantly punished and there is no chance of this being a useful method of play. The only thing that can win almost every round are the super-duper, amazing, look at how awesome the graphics are, aren’t these super cool, power-ups! Without the power-ups you cannot win any round, the power-ups are dependent on the bricks delivered, the bricks delivered are dependent on luck and there you go. Unless of course that is, you purchase power-ups (at ludicrously expensive prices which I can’t imagine anybody would actually pay) which is of course the whole reasoning behind the game! Having said all of that, the animation is great and the colours are vibrant and it’s very catchy. This could be a really stunning game with a few tweaks, okay fairly big tweaks then. Have fun playing it.. but you have been warned!