ReignMaker is a match-3 game similar to Bejewled or Candy Crush Saga, where your matches are used to kill invaders coming after you. Overall,ReignMaker is a match-3 game similar to Bejewled or Candy Crush Saga, where your matches are used to kill invaders coming after you. Overall, this game is a mediocre time waster that falls way short of its promises. I'm going to copy/paste the first line of its Steam store page: "ReignMaker is a city building political strategy game with match-3 tower defense combat." Calling this game a city builder, a political strategy game, or a tower defense game is a serious insult to those genres, and this is coming from someone who enjoys those types of games.
You technically build a city, yes, but the "city building" is little more than waiting to collect resources and upgrading buildings. The only choice you make is what order you build things in. There's no real planning, no infrastructure building, and really, nothing interesting at all about this city building parts. They only serve as a vessel to get you upgrades, and are absolutely no fun on their own. Also, resource collection is really annoying. I never had nearly enough lumber, so I had to wait for hours, checking in every 30 minutes to harvest. Another annoyance is the gold, which appears on the ground as you fight. It spawns so frequently that it's a huge distraction from the puzzle, and you won't get nearly enough if you don't pick it up. Scouts are a necessity if you want to progress since they take that element out, but that's one fewer person you can take into tough levels.
There is technically political strategy, yes, but it amounts to a series of questions, one per level, that almost never have any consequences at all. When there are, they're minor at best. It has all the depth of an Internet quiz. After making choices, you can find out your city's "culture", which matters none at all, really.
When it says it's a "tower defense" game, though, that's completely misleading. In a tower defense game, you place towers strategically to impede and attack units that are trying to get through, and that's not what this game has. In this game, you defend towers with match-3 combat.
Now, for the match-3 elements. The core match-3 gameplay is present in this game, and it does provide some challenge. The spells and the people you hire are interesting additions that shake things up. This game suffers from poor design decisions overall, though. The difficulty curve is a mess, with a huge spike at level 10 before varying wildly between really easy and very difficult. The boss battles are mostly luck; you have to attack very rapidly with matches and spells and hope that you get enough combos to win before your opponent murders you (even worse, you can defeat the boss but still lose the match and be forced to replay). Also, some of the levels are excessively long, which really sucks when you run out steam and lose 20 minutes in to a level.
This isn't the worst game I've played, not by a long shot. I still played this game to the end, probably just because the match-3 combat was enough to hold my interest for a while. This game is really heavily flawed, though, and it spectacularly fails to deliver on its promises. Sadly, this game is little more than a time waster, which isn't good enough for me. It looks like this game is still being worked on, however, so hopefully some things can be ironed out, but it will never be a "city building political strategy game" with "tower defense combat". Ultimately, this game is just a second-rate Puzzle Quest. This game's a joke at $15. I think I can only recommend this game if you can find it for $2 or less.… Expand
