RedShip Reviews

slightly less generic match-3 with a rare space coat of paint, very dramatic but just as repetitive music, a crazy amount of typos for what little text there is (3 just on the mission complete screen) and some tag abuse on the store page, from choices matter to puzzle platformer. at least full price got reduced after a while to 4 eur and I picked it up for much less (it rarely goes on sale) but it was still not a good deal. not a lot of content, there are 3 unexplained difficulties for the same 5-stage mission. only easy available initially, and an endless(ish) arcade mode to unlock as a bonus. stages involve building a ship, avoiding asteroids, fighting enemy ships and eventually the boss, but it's all very chaotic. there are timers and other indicators but ultimately, just match as fast as you can and hope for the best. paying attention to what color you need more of helps somewhat but I could never figure out what triggers an enemy ship's weapon, an asteroid hit or some of the pretty much instant death situations in arcade mode. matches charge various things, 5-of-a-kind adds a random weapon to manipulate the board, as long as there's enough energy, provided by matching special tiles. unfortunately, right click doesn't cancel the currently selected one if you change your mind, gotta click the icon on the left again. the tutorial is just a few static help screens, could be more informative. settings consist of separate volumes, a mute all button and nothing else. both are only available from the main menu, as the pause menu is just that: pause. alt+enter only makes a non-resizable window, useless. no level select or mid-level saving, but if you quit or fail, you can continue from the same stage next time. no mid-run saving in arcade mode at all. there are also unnecessary and tedious annoyances to appeal to who knows what demographic. random tiles get a counter and will become frozen when it runs out, except it's not turn-based but a few real-time seconds. or you have to quickly click random tiles 8(!) times to make them movable and matchable again (or avoid instant death by overheating in arcade mode), and the hard mode engine charge level would be frustrating enough without the time limit, but as it is that's where I gave up, was sick of losing all the matching progress literally every few seconds. not to mention most of these obstacles make it hard to impossible to tell what color the underlying tiles are, so it often turns into frantic trial & error. oh, and progress is lazily stored in the registry.