Fractal: Make Blooms Not War Reviews

This game is alright, but it's got a -serious- case of "trying too hard to be cool." The game basically has you using hex-based block matching to score points, with the 'campaign' as tutorial-become-challenge mode of sorts. I'm not the best at hex matching, and that's alright, the game is fine anyway, but the stylization in the messages you get for making matches of various sizes are just really silly. How is a certain pattern of hex-matching 'Old School!'? Why does the game tell me to 'Do that again!' when I match some small cluster that was in no way creative or highscoring? If seeing 'AAAaaaAAaaAAaAAAaaa!!!" flash across my screen is supposed to make the player feel accomplished... well... you get the picture. These messages come seemingly unscaled to the level of match made, and thus lack context in addition to being eye-rolling. There's a few UI bugs, otherwise fine. No multiplayer mode, which is unfortunate and hurts replayability.

A surprisingly simple mechanic belies the complexity of this game. The challenge of creating the tile rosettes that score points is enduring, as each move warps the present array in a manner reminiscent of both Rubik's Cube and Othello. No annoying time limits and bare-bones game mechanics. A nice little challenge.

Not bad for a color-matching hooray-you're-talented brain-numbing agent. I wouldn't mind having it on my phone rather than on my desktop -- it's more suited to passing the time than sitting down and gaming. I do like the soundtrack that's in a constant state of "Amen Break".

fun, cute, and easy to learn. Scales difficulty very smoothly, there are both plenty of hard and easy puzzles to play.

I really wanted to like this game but it is really just not that engaging. It strikes a really odd blend between a fast-paced arcade puzzle game and a deeper mind game, but not in a fun or satisfying way at all. The first few levels set you up with easy, single-color "puzzles" that are a thin excuse to blast away some pieces into beautiful, Tony Hawk-like combos. So far so good! I'm getting ready for the game to ramp up into a big clusterfuck of hard but super explosive and rewarding action. Nope. You get through about a handful of levels before it quickly fizzles into a large and very tedious puzzler. I will admit that it is intricate - perhaps I simply lack the tens of hours of investment needed to really enjoy the game - but all it really was to me was a big turnoff. The patterns are simply too large and convoluted to make sense of intuitively, very early in the game, and having to deal with different colors that interfere with each other makes every single move a punishment. The tantalizing but undelivered promise of explodey-comboey arcade action only makes it more frustrating. Don't expect this game to be what it appears to be from previews but if you enjoy very intricate games like Sudoku, Kakuro, maybe Go, and you don't mind spending quite a while to either pore over a single puzzle or learn all the pattern-matching you'd need to play this game somewhat fast, go for it.

A relaxing and enjoyable little puzzle game. Every so often I find myself going back to it and just playing it for a bit.

Fractal is actually a very stylish looking game but it's missing a few important things; a tutorial. No, the game isn't that hard to figure out, but ask me what the power-ups do and I honestly couldn't tell you. Most of the times I just try to connect them with the other tiles, obviously, and it triggers several combos. It usually takes several tries to finish a level. A tutorial is A MUST. Another thing that bothered me is that if I notice things aren't going my way, I normally ike to retry a level. There's no button for this. There's only a pause button. So in the end I have to click up to 20-30 times in order to restart a level. This definitely needs to be implemented. Also, the text is a bit blurry, even on extremely high quality. If the developer can fix it, it will look smashing. I like the slowmotion endings, they look really cool. Now, would I recommend this game ? Yes and no. If none of my complaints is fixed, then no. If they do decide to fix them; yes. [Rating: 70/100]

This is a pretty neat little puzzle game. It's something like a cross between Othello and Bejeweled. It's got some pretty great background music. If you're looking for a casual puzzler, this is a pretty good one.

Satisfying and simple effects. Nice visual design, and the sound effects/music mesh with everything well. The core gameplay mechanic of filling the board relies too much on randomness for me, though. I can be calculating and strategic with the deterministic pushing and powerups, but the random placement of tiles after a bloom pops feels like a lottery I can't control.

Very enjoyable. This game didn't last me long; I quickly reached a stage where it was just too hard to complete the levels. However, I really enjoyed it. The music is enjoyable, the graphics are very aesthetically pleasing, and the gameplay itself is simple to understand but fun to play. I would be interested in seeing more from this developer.