Triple Town

I've had this on Steam for awhile now. Don't be fooled by it's initial appearance, it is not "Just another Match 3." You have a main island which you are building up with monuments and resource factories and there are 5 to 7 other islands serving as puzzles (with slight variations) from which you earn your resources. Every three similar items you place besides each other (in any direction) merge to create one grander version of that item and the goal is to merge up as many sophisticated structures (ie; Growly bears --> Tombstones --> Churches --> Cathedral ) before you run out of space. Highly addictive and fun to play with little ones.

I guess it has to be acknowledged that in a way, I'm reviewing not the game, but my reaction to it. I have an island with the level "10" buildings in Farming, Military, and Industry, and anyone who has played the game can have a rough sense of how long that takes to accomplish. There are games that I've sunk that much time into that I don't regret, but this isn't one of them. It's great at creating compulsive play, but ultimately it feels arbitrary, grindy, and stingy. Like I didn't so much become accomplished at playing it as I "weathered" it. The underlying system is obnoxiously random, and where it isn't random, it's punitive. Everything you buy with your gains from grinding ultimately goes towards trying to corral the game's systems into mitigating that randomness, and it's always eventually a losing battle where the randomness or arbitrary player-punishment will overtake any vestige of skill. If you aren't struggling with ninja bears ruining your plans, you're cursing the game for filling your needlessly limited inventory slots with level-one terrain for use in the meta-game. Even the act of building the "best" building is punished from a practical stand-point: you get more of a end-game money bonus for the four (what happened to triple...?) buildings that went into it than you do for the building itself, though naturally by that point you need the space if you want to keep going. There's so many little things like that which are needlessly frustrating at the game and the player's expense. You can't SELL any of that junk to clear your inventory space. The interface is chunky, unresponsive, and lacking in feedback, making it very easy to mis-place pieces. Items that are given away as bonuses with whimsical abandon cost thousands of gold to BUY, leaving the player again at the mercy of the RNG. It feels like what it is: a game that was designed as free-to-play, and never properly re-imagined to ease the frustrations of the type for the sake of fun. A pity.

Don't waste your time & money with this fake "Premium" Triple Town. instead go to Facebook to test it for free. You'll see even if you pay here, this is probably same version as "freemium". Concept isn't bad and looked addictive. You have "just" to match 3 sames icons to advance in-game. But in real after some minutes of play, truth came on my tired eyes : -> Boring as hell : only repetitive actions. -> Time eater : some challenges can take many hours to be solved. -> Lot of grinding needed like freemium version on Facebook, no gold allowed easily for those paid this gog version. Don't let Facebook games invade gog.com. It worth better without that !!! -> You can create only 1 profile to play. If you want to start another party from begining you have to deklete manualy your savegame.

The game it's well done and very polished (except for having to manually go to fullscreen every time) But, before buying this, make sure to give a try to the fremium version and make sure you like what you're doing because there is not much else.