Epic Paint Adventure review: helping painters to finish masterpieces one move at a time

I thought Epic Paint Adventure was going be about embarking on a journey to either paint pictures or find lost popular ones, but it was kind of, sort of…neither.

Epic Paint Adventure is actually a puzzle game by Philippine game development studio Kuyi Mobile. It has you helping artists like Da Vinci and Van Gogh finish their famous paintings by collecting different paint colors for them.

So many paint blots, so little lives

The concept is simple. Collecting colors involves moving paint blots of the same color to form groups of four. This has to be done before you run out of moves. Each painter requires you to collect paint from several levels before a painting can be completed. For instance, I had to complete three levels for Da Vinci before he, or should I say “we”, could finish the Mona Lisa.

Epic Paint Adventure wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. You can only move a paint blot from one place to another if there is a clear path for it to move. Every time I made a move, more paint blots appeared on the screen, sometimes blocking the next path I want to take or the spot I want to move to. There was no way for me to tell when or where the next ink blot is going to pop out and ruin my plans.

Now I would have been okay with this whole structure if I could simply try again whenever I failed. However, Epic Paint Adventure makes use of a stamina system, giving you just five hearts at a time. One heart is needed for every level attempt. And get this: it takes 30 minutes for a life to be replenished. I don’t know about you, but that feels too long.

Epic Paint Adventure is free so I understand that there had to be a way for them to monetize the game somehow, but I would rather pay for a full game than to fork out cash every time I wanted to continue playing. And I don’t really want to wait for half an hour either.

(See: If you put a stamina system in your game, I hate you)

Since I lost a life every time I failed to finish a level, I was expecting to have something in return if I finished one. True enough, I was rewarded with a bit of trivia about each artist and his masterpiece. I thought it was clever for Kuyi Mobile to do that because not everyone knew who Da Vinci or Van Gogh was in the first place. However, I was let down by the fact that each level for a particular painter repeated the same trivia over and over.

What’s an art-based game without colors, right?