Spirit Stones review: a puzzle RPG with a touch of TCG

Upon reading in an announcement earlier today that Spirit Stones, Gamevil’s latest game for Android, is a “Puzzle RPG with a TCG twist”, my curiosity was immediately piqued. How is that possible? The only way to find out was to give it a try.

Gameplay: Do not let the colors and simplicity fool you

Truth be told, the main gameplay mechanic is easy to understand. Although it makes use of the turn-based RPG concept of having characters in a party battle enemy players or monsters, you attack using puzzle gameplay. It’s basically a matter of sliding your finger across the screen to connect three or more colored spheres that issues an attack command to a character with the corresponding color. The total damage is the attack power of the character multiplied by the number of spheres you were able to connect. So the more spheres you connect, the higher the damage. There are also other objects that affect your gameplay aside from spheres such as bombs, healing potions, swords, bows, hammers, and dynamites to name a few. You will discover more of these things as you play the game.

At this point, if you are thinking it’s another copy of Candy Crush or Chuzzle with a slight hint of RPG and TCG, hold it right there. Remember that you have enemies that can attack you, too. And if you are not careful with the combinations you connect, you will end up dropping. In regular puzzle games, you can get away with just connecting a few blocks to make way for other blocks. In Spirit Stones, that is not such a good idea because that’s like wasting a turn for your entire party.

Now to make things a bit more challenging, the game throws in some TCG ideas. Each player has a set of cards. Each card represents one character, which can be one of any four classes — Warrior (Red), Mage (Blue), Archer (Green), and Thief (Yellow). You may choose up to four different cards to form your party. Players may also enhance their cards by enchanting them or combining them with other cards to form new cards.

According to the announcement, the game has 400 unique characters, which means there are a lot of different combinations and possibilities for players to experiment on and play with. And don’t worry about running out of stages, as there are currently over 500 stages in the game.

When I started playing, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. I’m pretty bad at trading card games so I expected this to turn out rather horribly for me. That was not the case. I actually found the game interesting and was determined to come up with a better strategy after the first time my party got wiped out. Yes, it’s a puzzle game that requires you to have an attack strategy and I think that’s great.

However, I encountered several problems while playing this game. I first installed it on my phone, where it kept on crashing. Wondering if it was a device-related problem, I switched to my tablet where the crashes were minimal, but it kept on telling me my internet connection (which was fine at the time) was fluctuating. I had to reconnect and restart a lot of times, which ruined most of the game experience for me.

Audio and visuals: Why do the cards look different? Was the sound supposed to disappear?