So a Spartan, a ninja, a barbarian, an archer and a mage walk into a dungeon. What happens next? Puzzles, apparently. Specifically match-3 style puzzles, replete with combos and high scores and glittery magic goodness, which the team over at Deqaf Studio have managed to blend into the turn based RPG formula with superb dexterity. That's right, Dangerous Adventure is a dungeon crawler with a dose of Candy Crush Saga sprinkled on top. The result is a fun exercise in genre blending, where the simplistic joy of match-3 combo creation melds with strategic deployment of each character's skills to great effect. So what do you get when you put a band of misfit vagabonds in a dungeon? A fun, challenging, Dangerous Adventure, that's what!
In each dungeon, you move from encounter to encounter, each marked with a different difficulty. Battles with enemies take place on a board filled with coloured runes to match, each colour corresponding not only to enemies, but to each member of your party, and by clicking clusters of identical runes, you'll trigger attacks from characters with matching colours. You'll deal higher damage if those runes match an enemy's colour as well, but the colour wheel in the upper left corner will tell you what each hue is strongest and weakest against. Each match or action you make counts down the rounds until an enemy can attack you, and if you run out of health it's game over, so make sure to use items or defend when necessary. Weapons and health can be upgraded in the tavern between adventures (this is a fantasy RPG after all), though the characters feel very samey if you subtract their special moves. Upgrading one's health and another's attack can quickly lead to a unbalanced party. But that's part of the strategy after all. It's up to you to build an optimal team that you can work with. Throw in some charming artwork and music that seems worthy of a Spielberg movie and you've got one heck of an experience.
Obligatory colourblindness-rant.
While the monster-fighting part of the game properly distinguishes (what I assume to be) blue and purple tiles through symbols, I couldn't determine which of the two runes would do half-damage to red monsters. In chest-opening it was impossible for me to distinguish the two colours at all. I can only imagine the horrors of trying to figure out the colour of a monster.
I genuinely liked the game, but the lag...OH THE LAG.
At least on Chrome, it would literally pause for about a second before showing the animation for the attacks.
@tchakkazulu:
I can't even begin to imagine. I'm sorry. The only games I've seen that do a decent job of helping colorblind players are escape games (like Tesshi-e), who helpfully provide subtitles of the color names.
This is loads of fun. I just wish the animations went a little bit faster.
I had to use the right-click menu to adjust the quality to low before I got decent performance.
I really wish some things were explained better. I think buying a special ability more than once decreases the cost to use it, but only the healing ability actually says anything like that. The special abilities seem to draw from a pool that fills up as you collect tiles of the hero's color and resets at the start of every map. It'd be really nice to have a meter that shows how close I am to being able to activate each special ability. I'm certainly not going to keep the running totals in my head.
I was actually wondering how color blind people where supposed to get through at one point. I was fighting an enemy that would randomly turn tiles gray and unusable. It never occurred to me that there was no way to judge a monster's vulnerabilities except its color.
I can't figure out how to use the items I purchased! Help, please!
I've never used any items, but there's a button above the plat field that says inventory.
Getting multiple instance of a special ability makes it better, yet it depends on the ability what that means, only for few it means less cost.
For example, curing makes more purple tiles turn into cure stones, Stunning extends the stun time, etc.
Yes it would be nice if this was explained better.
I wonder if there is any real benefit in taking lots of stones at once, other than to have lots of stones, you get a special animation for it, but I've yet to see if it improves compared to not going length to connect a hugh block and taking it in pieces at one time.
nice music! i left it on overnite and didn't get tired of it
Meh. It's kind of a grind -- on the handful of maps I've seen, the game intentionally puts high-level baddies in front of chests but behind waves of low-level enemies that you'll have to play through again later just to reach the big bads...and then maybe a third or fourth time if you don't manage to open the chests. Which is likely, since it's apparently not guaranteed that it will be possible to get the required numbers of each gem color with the board that spawns.
I'll also quibble with the colors. Even for the not-colorblind, purple clearly belongs between blue and yellow on the color wheel...but for some reason it isn't. That kept tripping me up, as I would assume that e.g. green enemies could be damaged by yellow and blue, when in fact they can only be damaged by yellow and purple.
Also agreed that the interface and mechanics could use some streamlining and better explanations.
On the other hand, I didn't have any lag (chrome, ubuntu) and I did like the overall concept, the music and the upgrade trees.
^ I meant "purple clearly belongs between blue and red", of course.
Yeah, my biggest gripe is That's Not How A Color Wheel Works, Dammit. If you're going to skip orange, then the colors should go: purple, blue, green, yellow, red, back to purple.
I also don't understand how the monster attacks work, especially when they start getting those little squares that are listed on the left side of the board. And I've never noticed the shield to be particularly effective (read: it has absolutely no effect that I can discern).
As far character mana for using special abilities (I think that's what Bill was asking about earlier), their numbers are listed below the board.
Colorblind people should give this one a wide berth. So should match-3 fans: with only four turns on each board, and only certain colors being useful in each round, there really isn't much chance for actual match-3 playing goodness. Instead, you're essentially collecting colorful ammunition. (Not to mention, you only need to match 2.)
Well I was quite enjoying this but now my green hero has gone and changed to purple. I didn't seem to get a choice of either colour or hero it just forced me to do it after I finished dungeon 10.
Am I missing something obvious ?
The shield does work Reka but only for one round. It mitigates the damage by the percentage shown on the shield. You can see what damage the enemy will do by mousing over them. If is, therefore, only worth using of you have an enemy about to attack ie if its countdown is 1 you know its going to hit next round.
The squares on the left hand side are where the enemy has cast some sort of scroll. Again mousing over them shows you what affect it is having on the affected tiles (if that is what you meant).
Also it you can get an extra turn if you either buy the island from the dream book which gives a permanent upgrade to 5 moves or buy a scroll in the shop for a single turn.
Yaddab, you can change the color of the heroes in the upgrade panel after the ability is unlocked. I've yet to figure out why you would want to do this. I guess if you know you'll be fighting a boss of a particular color?
Thank you Kinberly you are a star ! :)
*Kimberly sorry not Kinberly
It was nice for a while but later it gets too easy. Especially the last level that is supposed to be the hardest is totally easy because of your characters getting imbalanced. For example you will soon have enough yellow stones so the yellow character could stun a boss for the whole match. And you will have enough green and blue stones to shoot down the last boss with the green and blue characters. Most important thing you have to do is to prevent certain enemies from casting a spell - especially the vampire spell should be avoided.
Also, when upgrading I went for maximum attack points instead of maximum health because if you get many hits later in the game, you are playing wrongly anyway and some additional health points will only delay your defeat :-)
What does the cover of the dreambook say? it opens too fast for me to read. (thanks)
"All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers."
I stumbled across a bug:
If you use the green potion that doubles your hero's attack power, the effect lasts throughout the current dungeon.
This makes the game pretty easy. Too bad there's no real payoff for winning--you just go back to the tavern as usual, unless I've missed something.
Somebody please tell me what's the point in changing a hero's color (once you unlock a weapon of another color)? Having all those useless gems on the board just makes things more difficult. And you can't do full damage to certain enemies.
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