Luckr

Clickr is a bright, friendly puzzle game with fun-looking characters. So why haven't you ever heard of it? And why are there only a handful of players on its leaderboards? Well - aside from a complete absence of marketing - the underlying game just isn't ... good.

The gameplay itself is simple enough. Not dramatically different from your garden variety Bejeweled clone, your goal is to gain points and combos by clearing large arrangements of like-colored blocks; and you can create these arrangements by clearing smaller blocks out of the way, whereby gravity causes replacement blocks to fall in from the top of the play field. There are a handful of quirks tossed in to this formula, but they don't fundamentally change moment-to-moment play.

Although there are a few other modes to unlock (I'll get to this in a bit), the centerpiece of the game is a "puzzle stage" mode, a sequence of stages with unique challenges -- attaining a goal score, executing a certain number of combo moves, etc. And these goals, combined with the aforementioned gameplay, are the real problem with Clickr -- your ability to form large blocks for points and combos, and continue to do so within the stage's time limit, is governed entirely by the random chance of new blocks falling in. Some of the stages I played, practically won themselves, by virtue of fortuitous arrangements falling in. Other stages became literally impossible in some attempts, due to the refusal of the game to give me what I needed.

There are other modes of play, which I assume change this adversarial relationship between the game's mechanics and objectives. But to unlock them, you need to spend block points, which you can only gain by grinding away at the "puzzle stage" mode. So. Fuck that.

UPDATE: I decided to go back and try to unlock the other modes, just to see what they were like.

• "Battle" mode is actually a pretty neat idea, where getting combos sends little attacker dudes over to your opponent -- like a puzzle-driven Swords & Soldiers. But it's still vulnerable to the game's intense reliance on chance.
• "Push" mode is almost exactly like Battle mode, in the sense that combos will "push" a block of the combo's color toward your opponent, and you must push a certain number of them to win. It seems like a pretty pointless derivative of the already-superior Battle mode.
• "IQ" mode is what I really wanted to try, where there are no replacement blocks and you have to figure out how to use combos to clear the field of all blocks. But now Clickr's other central mechanic - rotating the play field - becomes the problem. Most of the IQ puzzles are framed around this rotation and how gravity will move blocks around the field, and frankly, it is just too goddamned confusing. When you have to rotate left, then right, right, left, right, right, right, ... et al, just to push some blocks together - and a wrong move at any point will make the puzzle unsolvable - no, thanks.

So, overall, my opinion of the game is no better than it was before.

Add to these grievances a general lack of technical care and support, like no resolution options and lingering bugs, and I'm hard-pressed to find kind words for this game.

Progress: Puzzle Stage 21, IQ puzzle Easy-16.