Card to Kill: Block Legend DX

I end up with a lot of games from groupees bundles, as I've mentioned earlier. The current system tends to poop out 1-2 games every two weeks, which tends to give me a lot of games to process into cards. Block Legend DX was sort of interesting to me because I immediately felt regret I'd added it to my Steam account when I could have given it to someone else.

After playing it for ten minutes, that emotion faded.

Block Legend DX is oddly enough a match two game, in a somewhat similar vein to Puzzle Quest. Unlike Puzzle Quest, the tiles you match can not be manipulated and only activate when clicked on, as well as offering their unique effect when triggered. You can match up melee attacks, spells, healing, blocking, so on and so forth. There is some bonus for chaining the same tile repeatedly, and they do more if you match up more than the initial two. You shape your character with leveling, so different classes and different leveling paths will result in a different evaluation as to which blocks to trigger.

You can also heal, which is slow, but more you're supposed to put up your 'shield' to block. The block bar is much shallower than your health pool, but much faster to refill, so combat sort of forms an odd rhythm of refilling your bar and then returning to whichever other element you're triggering. Out of combat, the blocks remain, which gives you a chance to reshape the "terrain" of your field and refill your various stats.

The game is all done up in cute, ye olde Final Fantasy style sprites or whichever sprites you associate with these. The game is definitely pleasant to look at, as it is very simple but very colorful and lively. A lot of it actually sort of wasted, since while you're staring at the tiles and trying to figure out your next six moves, your little character is dancing around, waving his or her weapon and frolicking while the enemy does as well.

The music is brutal. The tracks are about 23 seconds long and sound like Gameboy tracks. Not GBA. Original gameboy. The game also likes to play very, very loudly when you first start it up, which was unpleasant. It's weird how it looks so nice - I mean it's retro pixel style, but it's colorful and well done - but sounds so awful. It's all abstractions anyway, but there's a lot of effort put into the art, even if I think it's a mobile port.
 
The core system is actually pretty good, and each game takes about 10-20 minutes to play before ending. The first couple times you play the game, it's pretty sweet, then the bitter reality of the game starts to set in.

You march forward in a straight line, encountering random enemies along the way to the boss. There will be two, and exactly two, towns on each stage. 90% of the time, the town is useless, as it is either impossible to have the gold necessary to do anything, or you've already spent the gold on something else. Or you don't need an item, so it's still useless. You would think the developers would, I don't know, put something useful in the initial towns. I mean this seriously, you just can't have as much gold as it wants you to have early on, because they lazily have all towns scaled to the same costs throughout the game. So there's basically no point to it being there, and no one bothered to fix that because...? I don't know.

The problem really comes in as a matter of difficulty and just pointlessness. Random enemies are basically hapless, even if they were threatening, you can heal up between encounters. They become somewhat relevant on the third or I assume later boards, but they're still basically 30 seconds of who cares in between 30 seconds of who cares. So after it kicks in it doesn't matter, you just march forward to the boss, and the boss is dramatically more difficult. You need to hit a rhythm of block block heal attack attack in between boss swipes, which can be very difficult to do, or not difficult at all. If you chain enough damage combos you can flatten most of the early bosses, and if the game is receptive you can just set it up so you do.

This is a block matching game, after all, and while you can shape the initial field you get when you encounter the boss, you can't really play too many moves ahead while trying to play keep ahead on the block block matching. Most of the time, I found I died to a boss with it below 50% health, but I ran out of block blocks and just died. Or couldn't heal. Or it three shot me. Or it didn't give me any way to actually do damage to the boss.

On top of that, whenever the boss makes a move, you can't input any moves. Between the slow progression of tiles falling into place and the jilting inability to make a move every couple seconds, bosses are dramatically more difficult while not really intense in the right way. And you ONLY die on bosses, so the rest of the game is a huge waste of time. Lastly, and bizarrely, when you complete a quest it flashes a big old quest complete across the entire screen. It can and often will do this midbattle, which just adds to disjointed nature of the boss fights. Since the boss fights aren't very good, and they're the entire focus of the game, the game ends up ... Not very good.

So, basically, you spend about ten minutes or longer getting to the second or third stage boss, then you hope that RNG doesn't screw you or it splatters you in short order while you're essentially defenseless. On top of all of that, the game punishes you further for RNG if you run out of moves. Yes, when you're playing zenmode Bejeweled 3 it is possible to line up moves to make certain you don't deplete, but here you're trying to go block block heal attack attack, and the game is vomitting unnecessary blocks at you.

The item system is kinda shitty too. You can buy items in towns (assuming by some miracle you have enough gold, which is rare) or you can get them from matching the 'item' blocks. Yes, there's an entire set of blocks that eventually give you loot, which fills up a bar on the left hand side. Once it fills, you get an item, though I'm not entirely certain how it works entirely. You're supposed to use items on bosses, but you generally ends up in such a hectic rush that the whole process feels even more disjointed and shitty, assuming you found anything useful at all, which most of time you didn't.

Fundamentally, while I enjoyed my first hour with Block Legend DX, I wouldn't bother playing a second hour. It's just too rng driven, and the roguelike nature of the game means you're back to level 1 killing farting fairies again if the game spawns too many of the not-useful-in-combat blocks. I'm sure I could play better, but the issue here is that you barely get any practice playing the "real" game. It's minute after minute of grinding nonsense, then finally real combat that can be over before it began with a few bad falls. The core of the game isn't too bad, but there's too many block types, you can't swap blocks around and it just feels so random in a really bad way. Also the game's flow is terrible, and you're basically given no time to do anything.