Metacell: Genesis ARCADE Reviews

love this game! really cool group of people.

This game is genius. It is a mixture of the classic Galiga formula mixed with puzzle games we know and love, such as Puyo Puyo and Tetris. It's like the game from our childhoods that we simply never had, until now.

really fun with a great soundtrack, i'd spend more at the arcade in quarters on this than it costs on steam

A pretty unique style of Match-3 game, and I really enjoy the concept. The closest puzzle game to compare it to would be Puzzle Bobble / Bust-A-Move. But instead of staying at the bottom of the board and bouncing your pieces into place, the board is round and you move around it, firing inward in a straight line. As you play, the inside grows new cells on its own - in addition to the ones you fire in, minus the ones you clear by matching 3 or more - and you sometimes get powerups that make area-clearing blasts or erase all pieces of that color when matched.. the standard sort of stuff. [b]But then the most interesting part.[/b] The 'board' you play on is a living organism that is trying to grow, and it's angry that you're trying to destroy it. As you're clearing pieces as quick as they can grow, the creature sends out more and more attacks to try to slow you down. It starts out pretty mild, only lashing out with a small, easy-to-avoid attack every now and then, but after a while it starts to get tricky. You can only take a few hits, then it's game over, so on top of trying to play quickly to build and maintain high combos, and stop the cells from growing outside the walls of the board, you also have to watch for the tells and avoid attacks. It makes for a pretty unique experience that I think is absolutely worth 5 bucks. If I had some feedback on something I'd like to change, I think I'd prefer if the enemy's attacks disappear from the border of the board as soon as they're no longer harmful. Currently the spikes and effects hang around and make an area look dangerous for longer than it actually is.

Metacell: Genesis turns Puzzle Bobble on its head and creates a wonderfully polished Arcade game that will have you frantically scanning the board for the next color match to keep your combo going. The soundtrack is stellar, packing a lot of intensity. The art is precise, and does a good job of keeping cells visually separate through both iconography and color. When reaching the later levels of the game, I feel like there could be more potential for comeback outside of bomb usage and the powerup that clears all of one color. If you fall too far behind around level 70+, all you can really do is stand there and lose all your lives. It might be cool if getting hit had a bomb effect? That'd open up the option to take hits on purpose at different parts of the board to try and find your footing again. I also wonder if the game would benefit from a "Hold" system like in Tetris, where you can store one cell to try and fish for a better option in the moment. That'd take away from the simple control scheme, so maybe not. As is, Metacell: Genesis is a great game that's very much worth the price! I got lost in it for several hours, and can easily see myself going longer to climb the scoreboard.

Great arcade style game that's well worth the money. Classic but creative. Perfect music and design. Looking forward to the full release.

Don't let the played time fool you, as I've had the chance to play plenty of this game before its launch on Steam. For the asking price, this game is 100% worth it. It takes a simple enough concept in the shape/color matching genre and adds subtle little extras, be they power-ups, quick chain bonuses, etc. It also adds an neat twist and theme in the titular Metacell, which is regularly fighting back against you as you continue matching blocks. The further along you get, the more the Metacell fights back against you, adding to the game a nice little difficulty curve. In short, if any of this even remotely intrigues you, then go for it!