Bricks n Balls +17

Normally I do not give freemium games the time of day. I believe all freemium games should be eliminated from the planet :-). This however, in my opinion could be seen as a free to try then pay to remove adds game. That I am fine with. In fact I wish more games would follow that model. However, they still offer adds for more Ruby’s or whatever they are and pitch a weekly subscription model which annoys me. However, that being said you don’t have to do those things and can still play the game. Once I paid to remove the adds the game was great. I would give it 5 starts if it were not for the other remnants of the freemium business model. And the subscription pitch seems like they were just having a meeting and said “let’s see if anyone is stupid enough to do this and pay us money weekly for the game”. If that got in the way of the actual game other than just having to skip it when you first load then I would not play at all.

So, I would suggest a few tweaks: keep the free to download and pay once to unlock full game model. Polish the game up a bit as a buy once game and get rid of freemium / subscription based remnants.

As far as the actual game goes, I love it. There are great boosts and it is, of course, a satisfying game to play while you watch all the blocks get decimated. That said, it could use some technical improvements.

I am no stranger to free games and the ads they frequently force you to watch every couple rounds. Typically I have seen these ads be 5 to 10 seconds in length or click out immediately. I don’t mind ads- Ive found a lot of games I like through them and Usually I don’t get stuck watching the 30 second ads unless I choose to in order to gain some extra points or prize. In this game, almost every single ad is 30 seconds long and they make you watch one after every round. I wind up spending more time watching ads than playing the game. It would be nice if they could shorten the ads if they are going to require you to watch one in order to play each level.

The bigger issue was that I did not even get to have this game on my phone for 24 hours before it started having major issues and kept restarting on me. For the last few hours I have gotten an error message that says “Data verification error, game will begin to synchronize the data and be restarted (1).” Every time the game restarts the message comes up again and I have not been able to play anymore levels. I have restarted my phone several times and cannot seem to remedy the issue so I guess I am just going to have to delete the game.

The gameplay is satisfying and addicting, and I’ve played this game often over the past several years. I am approaching level 600 and am still enjoying the gameplay. However, over that time the game has become near impossible to play without spending money. To play this game without spending money, I have had to stockpile in game currency (gems) for weeks at a time just to make it passed one level. Additionally, they have made several changes to how in game currency is earned that have significantly harmed the experience. They have increased the cost to continue on with a level after you have lost, which is the only way to beat levels after around level 300. They have also reduced the free daily ad-watching reward significantly to grant fewer gems per day, which now makes it so that you have to stockpile gems for weeks at a time in order to beat a single level. Lastly, it used to be the case that the free daily login bonus automatically was opened when you opened the app, but now that has been changed to a less user-friendly method where you have to manually open the login bonus screen. This no doubt significantly harms the new user experience.
Overall, I am very disappointed in the greedy changes that the developers have made to the game I used to enjoy a lot more. Now the gameplay is far too tedious to enjoy. I would not recommend this game.