The Enchanted Kingdom: Elisa’s Adventure

The Android Market description for The Enchanted Kingdom: Elisa’s Adventure boasts that the game has a, “complete absence of violence”. In a pastime many folk believe consists entirely of shooting men in the face (take a bow, Modern Combat 3), this sounds like a refreshing change of pace.

But after a few hours of endlessly replaying The Enchanted Kingdom’s casual adventure combo of match-three, chaining, and hidden object mini-games, you may find yourself craving a machine gun and some NPCs to mow down.

Ostensibly, The Enchanted Kingdom tells the simple tale of a peasant girl (Elisa) who may or may not be the heir to a throne.

To claim her possible birthright, she needs to find a royal ruby by travelling from town to town and solving each community’s problems before moving to the next. There’s some real charm in these individual challenges, thanks to the somewhat whimsical nature of the plot.

One minute, for example, you’ll be helping a hungover Santa to retrieve his crashed sleigh, while the next you'll be helping a dragon with raging heartburn.

The sometimes clumsy translation also has its charms, particularly for fans of unintentional double entendres (a Mage who helps Elisa’s journey first tells her, “My sack has torn and I have lost all my stones”).

While the silly story does compel you through the adventure, the actual gameplay is lacking originality and requires a surprising amount of grinding for such a casual experience.

Aside from some rudimentary hidden-object stages set by the cast of eccentric characters (along with occasional puzzles, of the sliding block and rearranging pattern variety), the bulk of the game is distinctly PopCap-flavoured.

In each town you’ll have to gather resources to help construct new buildings requested by the locals, like a Mage’s Tower. These are collected through simple and polished match-three or chaining games that you can only complete by collecting all of the highlighted tiles on the grid.

Colourful, smoothly animated, and blessed with responsive touchscreen controls, these mini-games are diverting enough for those schooled in the addictive arts of Bejeweled and its ilk.

Hidden costs

Annoyingly, however, they take longer to complete the further you get into the story - with five minutes soon stretching to 20. Mini-game progress can't be saved, either, so if you’re playing on the go you can expect to miss a couple of bus stops if you want to polish off the later levels.

The other option, which the game constantly suggests to you, is to simply buy resources and buildings through in-app purchases. While cheap, at around 50p each time, it does seem that some mini-games are being annoyingly lengthened to encourage you to fork over the cash.

Some essential tiles are infuriatingly hard to match or chain-up, as items above often tumble away from where you need them due to the unpredictable (or, perhaps, cunningly programmed) physics.

Still, if you really want to see how Elisa’s oddball adventures pan out The Enchanted Kingdom’s repetitious gameplay is bearable and always colourfully presented.

Just don’t be surprised if you eventually find yourself forking out for the odd in-app purchase just to zoom past yet another protracted bout of matching three.