Knight Girl

My first impression of Knight Girl wasn't all that positive. It struck me as an okay match-3 puzzler that was basically just Candy Crush Saga without the candy.

My second impression, after working through a dozen or so levels, was a little more favourable. The way the game uses special tiles like rockets and bombs, and encourages you to combine them, is pretty cool.

But now I've circled back around to square one, thanks largely to a severely unpleasant approach to monetisation. The fancy rockets just aren't enough.

The goal for each level changes depending on which area you're in, but for the most part you've got X number of turns to clear X number of tiles by matching coloured gems.

Matching four gems in a row will create a rocket, which will clear out a line in the direction it's pointed (at the cost of a turn).

Five gems will create a cluster of rockets that will clear out all gems of the same color. Finally, connecting two sets of three at the same time (i.e. an L shape) creates a bomb.

Sometimes you'll be clearing pumpkins, which function like regular gems but don't create rockets. Other times you might be clearing stationary squares by creating matches on top of them.

It's all well and good until the difficulty starts to spike. Then you'll either have to pay through the nose to keep playing, or be very patient. Normally timers don't bother me in free to play games, but in Knight Girl they're pretty obnoxious.

If you fail a level you can spend one of your five lives to retry. Of course those lives take quite a while to refill. Or you could pay for five extra turns when you run out using the game's premium currency.

Lives, extra turns, power-ups – they all cost currency, and the stuff isn't exactly easy to save up.

It's a shame really. If it weren't for the fact that Knight Girl keeps trying to force me to pay it'd actually be a reasonably fun puzzle game. Instead it just feels like a money pit.