Dungeon Hearts

I have no recollection of buying Dungeon Hearts so I have no anecdote to start this off with. It's defined by Steam as a Casual Game, but I would term it more as a Casual Puzzler. Long story short, it's a single player game that has 4 characters utilized as a team, their attacks based on you matching coloured tiles that run across the board (each character is assigned a skill set and colour, matching colours activates that characters attack), utilizing all the same cascading power up attacks we've come used to in puzzlers; match 3 red orbs to make a diamond that will make the fighter attack, which cascades horizontally and vertically to cascade all red orbs on screen, more diamonds mean more attack multipliers, etc, etc. Each player has a unique skill that gets powered up and can be used, blah, blah, blah.

I can see some appeal to this game, this style is very addictive, however in order to make a game really something you need to augment gameplay with story and character(s), and this game has almost none of either. The 4 team-mates have individual attacks, but no personality; the bad guys you fight are optically unique, but nothing in the story gives you a feel for what they are or even why you're fighting them. I'll say this for what I expect to be the first of many times: gameplay is only half of a game; you need a good mechanic, but people will forgive buggy mechanics if the story/characters are good (anyone else think Bethesda when I said that?).

The biggest problem I had with this game was the sluggish interface; at always seemed like my moves were about a quarter second behind the game, this kind of lag makes a major difference, especially when you get to the higher bosses where every half second makes a big difference. I should note, this may be due to my hardware, but I played the game on 2 different computers, both fairly beefy machines, and had the similar results (although I did have better performance on Windows 7 then 8.1).

I would rate this about a 6/10, there's fun to be had here but you may fight the interface more than the bad guys. Giving me a reason to either like or dislike the in-game characters would have seriously tipped the scales on this games rating, however the low, low regular price of 2.99 makes it hard to arbitrarily dismiss the game.