Etienne Bedard puts the elements under your powers in his match-3, defense hybrid game, Tales of Terratos. Sure, you're no Captain Planet, but with fire, water, air and earth at your magical beck and call, you're sure to defeat the league of evil, elemental creatures pouring out of the pestiferous portal.
Each of the 25 levels involves matching tiles that correspond to either a particular element or ability. Earning enough of an element allows you to either cast a helpful spell, like healing, or summon an elemental. Elementals can be placed on one of five rows. Once created, elementals travel toward the enemy's side unless they run into an enemy. And then fighting ensues! Victory is achieved once your opponent's barrier is destroyed, allowing you to move onto the next level. Between battles, you can spend the arcane points you earn on upgrading your spells and elementals.
Bedard has created a match-3 hybrid that has a good balance of playing the match grid and paying attention to the action portion of the screen. It's not enough to just charge up the elements and cast spells willy-nilly; you have to pay attention to the field so you know where your elementals are needed. On the down side, the game needs a higher difficulty curve to be more of a challenge. If you're a match-3 expert and able to upgrade your spells quickly, the levels can become decreasingly frantic as your elementals are able to make easy work of the enemies. Despite this, Tales of Terratos is a game with quirky, cute graphics (courtesy of Etienne Jean) that will occupy your brain, eyes and hands with fun back-and-forth action.
An inoffensive little game. An aunty of mine might call it "nice."
If you have any sort of match-3 mojo, however, it is way too easy. It acts like there's a difficulty scale, but every level can be won with the equivalent of grinding. All you have to do
is keep an elemental in each lane. And there's a huge delay before the first monsters hit the field. Even the game level screen is boring... and you accumulate so many points to upgrade skills, it's like collecting sledgehammers in a greenhouse.
Even at later levels, I've barely read the new monster introduction before the level's cleared. Selection is a bit gummed up at times, which makes it even easier. It was like they spent a ton of time on FX and none on strategy.
Younger players and match-3 newbies may enjoy this. Otherwise, drop by Whirled and play Corpse Craft instead. https://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/07/corpse_craft.php
Is it me or are arcane points not carrying over from one level to the next?
scratch that, I see it now
I can't seem to find a Quality button or setting. It runs unplayably slow on my older computer here.
Kristie -
I looked too and didn't see a way of adjusting quality. Sorry it's slowing down on your computer, I wouldn't think the graphics would be an issue for this game.
Yeah, it crawls on my netbook as well. I'm kind of used to that, though, it chugs over a lot of browser games.
Well, I had a lot of fun with it. I feel that the winning strategy is definitely to favour elementals over other spells, except air. The air spell is boss.
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