Hero Emblems 12+

I’ve gotten a good number of hours’ entertainment out of this. It’s no Puzzle Quest but it’s fun in its own right. My one comment would be the dialog GUI style and sound effects feel unpolished. It starts out easy enough but does ramp up a bit in difficulty but it’s a good challenge and you have to save up for upgraded emblems, spells and potions. You really do need to pay attention to each monsters abilities and ensure you have spells equipped to counter them. The RPG element is lost since your whole group autolevels but you can buy spells and upgrades from towns. No IAP in sight which is fantastic. I would recommend this game to anyone itching for a puzzle adventure game that doesn’t annoy.

The gameplay is fine, pretty standard match-3. Around halfway through the game there is a HUGE wall, normally it took at most 3 tries for me to beat a boss, this level isn't even a boss and I've tried it over 20 times. There's not really any replay value of levels you've beat already, so the best way to level is to keep fighting the battle until you level enough to beat it which is annoying. It's also nearly impossible to get anywhere without a random ambush every step of the way, I get it there are monsters around, but it shouldn't take 15 minutes to get to the level I'm supposed to be playing.
The story though... it's horrid, you know exactly what's going to happen, and the dialogue is about as bad as it gets. Period jokes galore, the angry leader who attacks everything on sight, the forgetful girl is also the greedy treasure hoarder, the noble knight, terrible mocking of one character for no real reason (maybe it's supposed to be funny). I quit reading the dialogue pretty quickly once I realized it wasn't getting any better.

A great mix of match 3 and simple RPG. Major props to the developer for going with a fixed fee for this app instead of the usual pay-to-win junk. Even the stilted story would be forgivable if it wasn’t for the flat-out awful jokes.

I’m not easily insulted by much, but the jokes are just sort of mean-spirited and lack the funniness to redeem themselves. They leave me with that sort of awkward embarrassment for the sake of the person telling them. Like when you don’t want to be the one to tell the amateur comedian that they’ve crossed the line, so you just wait to see who will jeer at them first.

Seriously though, an otherwise clever game. I’ll bet you could double your sales or more if you fixed that one problem. I’d love to recommend this game, but can’t in good conscience - not to friends, family and especially kids. I wouldn’t want people I respect to think I’m willing to look past the jokes.