Lightslinger Heroes review - A puzzling RPG that shakes things up, but not that much

There's plenty of match-stuff RPGs out there, but they all seem to be based on the same matching idea. You've got a grid of coloured gems, and you can make horizontal or vertical moves to create matches.

Lightslinger Heroes does something different though. Instead of taking the Bejewelled formula and chucking some monsters into it, it takes Puzzle Bobble and throws some, well, different monsters into the mix.

You've got a row of orbs along the bottom of the screen, and a mish-mash of different coloured orbs arranged above. You drag a finger around the screen to aim, then release it to fire.

Making matches creates the attacks and healing spells that your team of heroes throw out. There are big monsters in a small section of the screen, and you need to smash them with your magical orbs.

While the core mechanic might be a little different, everything else surrounding the game is pretty familiar. There's upgrading, there's currencies, and there's levels where you're not going to be strong enough unless you grind before them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. This is a formula that's worked really well before, and while there's nothing here that's going to sway anyone's opinion of the genre as a whole, everything it sets out to do it does really rather well.

There's a compulsion here that pushes you on to fight the next big bad and open the next chest of strange things that you don't really understand. It's just nice to see the numbers go up and the orbs explode.

You'll upgrade your characters, burn through cards to strengthen them, and summon up new and more powerful creatures to add to your bestiary of fighters.

The orb

So yes, this is a game with an elemental system you need to get to grips with, a bunch of menus that you need to fathom out, and a middle-of-the-road puzzling mechanic that gets its claws into you in the simplest way.

It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it does push it in a different direction. And sometimes that's all you want in a game.

No, it's not the game that's going to change your mind about the puzzle RPG genre, but if you're already a fan, it's going to be a breath of fresh air.