An Overstuffed Hybrid Of Match-3 And Dungeon-Crawling
I’ve read plenty of books that felt like they needed an editor, wanting to tear pages out of them to make something a little less self-indulgent. But I haven’t played many games that feel that way. Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion is a very good game, practically oozing with ideas and concepts, but boy do I wish it had an editor.
Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion wonders what would happen if you took Puzzle Quest or Gems of War, and then turned it into a dungeon-crawler. It’s a winner of an idea, not least because Puzzle Quest and Gems of War are feeling a little musty nowadays. A reinvention through some genre-splicing sounds like a cracking idea indeed.
But Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion doesn’t stop there (and a wee spoiler: we think it probably should have stopped there). It staples a roguelike to that idea. You’re not just doing a spot of match-3 puzzling within some Binding of Isaac dungeons, you are playing the dungeons over and over again, hoping to make progress on a meta-layer.
A Deckbuilding Roguelike Match-3 Dungeon-Crawler
That’s a lot to digest, so we’ll space the idea out so you can visualise it. Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion is four floors of dungeon-crawling. Each floor is a series of tiled rooms, randomly placed next to each other. In each of these rooms is a match-3 puzzle. The room gets flooded with red, yellow, green, blue and purple gems, among others.
Also in those rooms are some important entities. There’s the player, newly entered through one of the doors. Plus there are enemies, most-often in the centre of the room. That immediately separates Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion from Puzzle Quest and Gems of War, where the character is offscreen.
The killer idea which makes Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion click is that a ‘match’ of three or more gems will damage any enemy that is next to the match (up, down, left or right of it). It’s so simple but brilliant. Enemies move with each match, so their position shifts, and that might mean that the cat, ghost or skeleton is closer to you but now near a potential row of purples. You match the purples, and the enemy gets damaged and potentially killed. You now have fewer obstacles on the grid.
Those enemies were coming after your character, which adds another layer to keep track of. You want to be moving your character about, primarily for safety as you dodge enemy attacks. But moving your character can also displace gems, which go on to form matches and chain reactions. You can also attack the enemies in hand-to-hand combat, if the gems weren’t quite falling in your favour.
Going Where Puzzle Quest Refuses To Go
This is all the stuff I love. It works so elegantly, and feels like the refurb of a loved genre. But Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion can’t stop adding stuff, and I just felt a bit overburdened with it all.
In the early game, Roguematch felt impenetrable, like I was never going to learn it; in the mid-game it was frustrating, as some new mechanic or boss would obliterate a long, forty-five minute run; and in the endgame, I was mostly just frustrated at how slow and flow-less Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion became.
I’ll try to explain why. Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion isn’t just about matching gems next to enemies. There are a host of other variables to think about. We’re barely scratching the surface here, but there are elemental weaknesses at play, with some enemies being strong or weak to certain colours; there are spells and equipment that require gems to power; the levels can be terraformed with the touch of a button; objectives appear that are not combat-related, like switches and clearing floor patterns; environmental effects apply to each room, like lava and ice; pets and familiars can be summoned; and each character has quirks that need to be learned.
We wanted to do an audit of Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion. Some of these ideas are lovely, and give it some much needed longevity. With some additional usability (plus some better tutorials on how they work), they would have enriched Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion. But others just feel like waffle – unnecessary additions that complicate rather than make the game better.
The Extramechanical Invasion
You can categorise a few of these unnecessary additions. Some have strange, unnecessary rules that make them opaque. Take equipment and spells. The player gains treasures that are either active (triggered manually and spending gem reserves) or passive (always benefitting the player). But Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion limits the number of items a player can have at a time, without offering a clear one-in-one-out system. Some items can be switched from equipment to spells and vice versa, but it’s not easy to see what the results of that change are. At other times, you can earn items but not now: they are vaguely handwaved as a reward for another time. And that often does not mean much.
Other rules are just poorly explained. Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion is determined to tell you about 80% of the game in the opening five minutes. Without context, this washed over my head, and I wished that Roguematch staggered its complexity more. There’s a wonderful game here, but I was hit round the cheeks with it in the opening hour.
And then there are additions which just make the game slow. I don’t want to be scanning each monster to see their elemental weaknesses and strengths every match. It should be dirt-simple. Purple creatures should be strong to purple attacks; red creatures should be strong to red. But Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion doesn’t do this – not reliably, anyway. It’s so frustrating.
The Outline Of A Better Game
I go on at length because I really do care. Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion is a brilliant game, tied down by too many mechanics. There was a point in the mid-game, once the rules of a match became clearer and I understood what certain items and enemies represented, that I wanted to gobble up Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion. Every free gaming hour, I wanted to spend time diving into another dungeon. There were new characters to find, new bosses to kill, and new equipment to add to the deck of potential rewards. I was grokking it.
The manifold mechanics never seemed to repeat themselves. I would create builds that focused on my red gems and red matches. I’d have builds that generated so many gems that I could spend them on auto-filling the map on every floor, or teleporting to the boss. It’s the benefit of a complicated game, I suppose: you can let the mechanics synergise with each other in ways that will surprise the player.
An Odd Hybrid
Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion made for an odd relationship. I loved it and hated it in roughly equal measure. The love came from an ingenious hybrid of dungeon-crawling and match-3 puzzles. The hatred came from Starstruck Games stacking more and more ideas on a simple concept, to the point that it became unwieldy.
It’s an example of game-design Buckaroo, but a few-too-many saddles or hats were thrown on top.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/roguematch-the-extraplanar-invasion/9nktg985vsvl
