The Secret of Success is Card Work: Clickr

I actually played Clickr well past the point of getting my cards, but somehow it just sounds like a pun name suits a silly little game. Clickr was on my wishlist, on Steam, for a long time before a friend bought it for me for Christmas after I bought them a game a day for a week or something. Steam sales are good for buying but they're really good for gifting!

Clickr is a very simple to learn puzzle game that relies on little more than three button presses. First and foremost is 'the clickng' which allows you to remove most pieces from the playing board with a click of the mouse. Your goal in doing so is to produce four squares of the same color, which join up to become a clickable big square that generates points. The game also allows you to rotate the board, with gravity always obeying whatever down currently is. There is little more on the basic level than this, you can also get 'turn squares' which increase points, chain combos and some game modes have 'block' and 'star' pieces which behave slightly differently. There's a fair amount of depth in the core gameplay even if the basics are very, very simple.

Presentation wise Clickr appears to me to be rather, well, Asian in origin with very cute graphics and an adorable sound track filled with happy noises. Apparently the studio behind the game is from South Korea, which wasn't my first guess, but I won't post my first guess since it kinda shows how poor I am as a white canadian man at telling different cultures apart. I digress; the game is smooth looking, the interface is good and like I said it is filled to the brim with large amounts of cute. My only real complaint with the art style and presentation lies with the skin feature. The game allows you to reskin it to your pleasure, but there's only three skins, which it could have used more!

In terms of content there really isn't a "basic" Clickr game. You open with puzzle mode, which is actually far more cerebral than it appears at first blush. I didn't really notice until stage 21 (which, if you buy the game, you'll probably notice as well) as to what is going on. After that you get battle mode and push mode, which are sort of "vs" game modes against the AI. Battle mode requires paying attention to the other player far more than push mode, with rewards for timing your stars and minetraps against the AI's wave of forces. It's a good extension to the main game, and fun in its way. Lastly there's a puzzle mode that centres more around turning than clicking, which is referred to as IQ mode. IQ mode feels like a more nuanced shifting block puzzle.

Each of the main modes will have a handful of additional tweaked modes based on them, such as a battle mode where you don't get stars but get tons of stones to make mines with instead. Most of these game modes are slightly different, but don't really offer a big enough change up to really make you enjoy a mode you've grown tired of.

Regardless, if there is one complaint about Clickr it ties back to why I had the game on my wishlist in the first place. I don't really go in for puzzle or match games. I really liked Bejeweled 3, but I only played it for a week or two before getting tired of it. You know who does like Bejeweled 3 a ton? My mother. So I've been looking for other puzzle games to put on her computer, and Clickr unfortunately does not fit the bill. There really aren't many casual modes for this game and the relaxing content dries up after the first hour. Past that, it isn't a casual game, and after a while success required something like 2 clicks per second. I'm not really fretting, it was never for me and I did have fun with it, but it's not casual enough to gift to my mother.

There's nothing really wrong with clickr, other than being a bit too hard, but if you're looking for another match puzzle game to fiddle with, it's a well made title with some cutesie graphics and a silly sound track. The presentation is good and the game, while simple, is pretty good.