Sango Gems review: Puzzle romance of the three dragon kingdoms

Sango Gems summed up is Puzzle & Dragons with a Romance of the Three Kingdoms theme. The game’s strange name comes from the Mandarin words 三国 (sān guó), which are commonly used in reference to the three warring states of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga.

As you may have already deduced, Sango Gems is a gem-switching game with a gashapon, or card collecting element. You start with one of three notable heroes from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga and proceed through the game with him. Along the way, you get to pick up more companions for your five man army, the first four being foot soldiers or heroes you obtain via the gashapon feature of Sango Gems, and the fifth character being an AI-controlled avatar belonging to a random player.

There are a few things Sango Gems does well as a clone of Pazu Dora. It’s got a great theme going. While the Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga isn’t new by any means, Sango Gems has breathed life into it with well designed 3D characters; the little chibi Romance of the Three Kingdoms heroes are adorable and well animated. They even come with cute facial expressions too. The gems in Sango Gems click with satisfying abandon. They feel substantial and movement is mapped well.

But just as there’s evil to offset good, so too does Sango Gems have its flaws. The biggest of which is its lazy localization. The game, developed by Taiwan-based firm Chinese Gamer International Corporation, is an obvious English port. And it’s not just evident through the text translation.

Most positions of the newly translated English words are oddly placed; these placements would look neat and tidy were Chinese characters put there instead. With many more English characters (and in an awful default font to boot), the game’s design is thrown off balance, and its otherwise polished finish tarnished by this lack of care.

Sango Gems is translated well enough for players to understand where they can go and for what purposes – like to the store or to the gachapon machine – but it’s not good enough for an English-speaking player to immerse themselves in the story. It’s a pity, because the Romance of the Three Kingdoms storyline has been good enough to spawn countless video games. As it is, it’s easier to tap your way through any unattractive text until you get to the gem-switching part of the game.

Sango Gems is not a bad clone of Puzzle & Dragons, but it made one fatal flaw with its gem-switching. There’s an option to battle automatically. This means the game immediately plays without you. I was given the option of auto and manual initially, and the game defaulted into auto battles once I made my choice. This option can be turned off so you can actually play the game for yourself, but it’s annoying to do that at the start of every battle. On top of that, Sango Gems is also not particularly balanced, as your party of five steamrolls most enemies very quickly.

That being said, it’s still not that bad a game since the central game mechanics are working well, and the visuals are pleasing to the eye. Just don’t expect any mind blowing game experiences with Sango Gems.