banichan
2014
I played this through BigFishGames for a little bit before quitting. The gameplay is basically just Candy Crush, but with a different skin and a different map.
If there was one thing I liked more about Gummy Drop, it was the map progression, where you actually built up certain areas as you finished levels. On the flip side, I personally preferred the more pastel/cute look of Candy Crush (well, Soda, I didn't play the other ones that much) over the eye-searingly bright primary colors of Gummy Drop.
In terms of everything else...level gameplay felt really similar to me, albeit more like original Candy Crush where there weren't as many variations to the levels. In games like this, the visuals are important to keeping people coming back imo, and I think unfortunately the map idea being kind of cool wasn't enough to overcome the really generic and less cute design.
If there was one thing I liked more about Gummy Drop, it was the map progression, where you actually built up certain areas as you finished levels. On the flip side, I personally preferred the more pastel/cute look of Candy Crush (well, Soda, I didn't play the other ones that much) over the eye-searingly bright primary colors of Gummy Drop.
In terms of everything else...level gameplay felt really similar to me, albeit more like original Candy Crush where there weren't as many variations to the levels. In games like this, the visuals are important to keeping people coming back imo, and I think unfortunately the map idea being kind of cool wasn't enough to overcome the really generic and less cute design.
2013
Okay so hear me out: this game is the bones of what could have been a pretty good video game. I'm not saying the game itself is good, because it absolutely feels like the developers got like 2/3 of the way through and the bosses told them to just ship it. I'm just saying it had the potential to be pretty solid and the biggest problem is just that it doesn't seem finished.
I actually enjoyed the storyline. Yeah, it doesn't 100% line up with canon, but that aside, it was a fun little romp and I got all the Kirk and Spock action I wanted from this. The actors did the voice acting, so it sounds quite good, and the music is pretty nice too.
The problems lie in the overall polish (both artwork and basic game elements). The art looks probably worse than average for its time, like they had put together basic models but hadn't gone back and properly touched them up yet. The game controls can be very janky, especially around jumping, and sneaking challenges were often nigh impossible to complete. I often had to just drop out and let my wife finish the level on her own (or vice versa) so we didn't have to do the same janky jumping puzzle twice to get through the area.
I personally didn't mind the way they handled upgrades, which were just to phasers (and finding better guns) rather than to characters. This was actually imo somewhat in the spirit of Star Trek, especially the ability to stun people instead of just killing them. However...the biggest problem was that they never implemented a system to save the second player. This is another reason I theorize the game was just forcibly shipped before the developers could actually do all the things they wanted - the game has a two player mode (which all things considered, I liked) but the second player cannot save their phaser upgrades. This means that you either commit to playing the whole thing in one go, or you just assume one person will be not that amazing - the only saving grace is that the game is tuned that this does not make it impossible to beat, just annoying.
I do want to say though: F the swimming level. I'm not sure if they purposely did the fisheye view for Spock but it was almost impossible to finish
Finally, I want to shout out the achievement that you get for dying as Spock in single player. This game had pretty decent writing that deserved a better final product than it got. If you really love Kirk/Spock action, and are not that fussed about repeating stuff a lot, this is still worth trying out. If you are not that sort of person, this game is an easy skip.
I actually enjoyed the storyline. Yeah, it doesn't 100% line up with canon, but that aside, it was a fun little romp and I got all the Kirk and Spock action I wanted from this. The actors did the voice acting, so it sounds quite good, and the music is pretty nice too.
The problems lie in the overall polish (both artwork and basic game elements). The art looks probably worse than average for its time, like they had put together basic models but hadn't gone back and properly touched them up yet. The game controls can be very janky, especially around jumping, and sneaking challenges were often nigh impossible to complete. I often had to just drop out and let my wife finish the level on her own (or vice versa) so we didn't have to do the same janky jumping puzzle twice to get through the area.
I personally didn't mind the way they handled upgrades, which were just to phasers (and finding better guns) rather than to characters. This was actually imo somewhat in the spirit of Star Trek, especially the ability to stun people instead of just killing them. However...the biggest problem was that they never implemented a system to save the second player. This is another reason I theorize the game was just forcibly shipped before the developers could actually do all the things they wanted - the game has a two player mode (which all things considered, I liked) but the second player cannot save their phaser upgrades. This means that you either commit to playing the whole thing in one go, or you just assume one person will be not that amazing - the only saving grace is that the game is tuned that this does not make it impossible to beat, just annoying.
I do want to say though: F the swimming level. I'm not sure if they purposely did the fisheye view for Spock but it was almost impossible to finish
Finally, I want to shout out the achievement that you get for dying as Spock in single player. This game had pretty decent writing that deserved a better final product than it got. If you really love Kirk/Spock action, and are not that fussed about repeating stuff a lot, this is still worth trying out. If you are not that sort of person, this game is an easy skip.
I loved this game. Back in the day, my friends and I used this as a party game, which I liked far more than Mario Party. Just the bizarreness of the art, the memelike nature of the games...this is a classic and I hope the new ones are all like this.
Played this because a friend owned it. I enjoyed what I got through but got frustrated by certain mechanics. Admittedly, I am bad at action RPG stuff, but there just came a point where I realized I was in for a lot of frustration, and the story I had gotten so far wasn't enthralling enough that I was willing to push through.
1998
Not sure if they knew then, but this would become the granddaddy to an entire genre of bubble matching games in the future :)
This was one of the first two games I had (outside of PC). I preferred the Zelda game, as it had a storyline, but this was fun to play as a change periodically.
This was one of the first two games I had (outside of PC). I preferred the Zelda game, as it had a storyline, but this was fun to play as a change periodically.
This was the very first non-PC game I ever played. My cousin gave me his old gameboy color with 2 games, including this one. It was pretty rough back then to get through without a guide (although luckily he gave me one) but still a lot of fun. I actually enjoyed the fact that it was so different from the usual Hyrule antics, and maintain this is a very underrated Zelda game.
Played this for a few levels just to see what it was like, and realized it was a lot of levels similar to Candy Crush Soda's "jam" levels, which were some of my least favorite. No hate on this game, it just wasn't for me.
This was the one CC game I actually liked. The variety of level types and updated artwork (compared to the original) were appealing, and it was nice as a casual thing to play on the side. Unfortunately the monetization got really painful, to the point where it was hard to progress at all without spending, and also the constant popups about buying the gold bars was really annoying. Then when I tried to go back, it turned out the company had made a bunch of changes to "downsize" the game so to speak, resulting in a lot of the fun small touches I liked being now removed. Not planning to go back again at this point, but it was fun for a while.
2012
Was fun for a hot second, but got pretty bored of the repetitive gameplay after not that long.
Played this for several years. I love the general concept (unabashedly feminine RPG, no real dating sim element, with a dress up aspect) but the monetization drove me further and further up the wall until I had to quit for my own sanity.
Nikki is probably still the top dress up game franchise out there in terms of quality, but honestly that's kind of sad because Nikki is top notch in terms of artwork but actually pretty crap in terms of anything else. Even purely in terms of story writing and game design, and introduction of new characters - I often like where they're trying to go but find they usually don't execute. The story was always a bit out there, but it just got weirder and less coherent, and it became clear they didn't have a very good plan and were making things up as they went. It was particularly bad on the global server, where we got story-relevant events and gameplay elements out of order, resulting in even more confusion. I think shortly before I quit there was a "resolution" to the vampires vs elves storyline, but I felt like there never WAS a true vampires vs elves storyline - it was mentioned a couple times, but the story didn't really tie in to anything or go anywhere. Later chapters also got significantly shorter with fewer levels and less story progression, seemingly to drag everything out further.
The game design also has a lot of interesting elements that Nikki proceeded to just ignore after a while, and never do an QoL updates for or otherwise fix. For example, there is an arena (for points-based PVP) and a competition (for style-based PVP), and both of these scaled poorly as the population increased, but Nikki never went back to fix these, and at some point seemed to abandon ever adding new rewards. Nikki also had really bad powercreep, to the point where you basically had to save up for the big "hell events" (basically big spending events where you could get expensive new outfits that were usually some of the best for both points and popular styling, aside from paid outfits) if you wanted to remain competitive. This also meant that the side content became less and less worthwhile.
And that's where things tie into the terrible monetization. I won't get too deep into this, but basically everything got more expensive. LN used all the tricks in the microtransaction-based mobile game book, and they got more and more grating as prices went up and a larger and larger proportion of items were locked being a paywall. I was also playing pretty early on, when they chose to dump all the expensive limited events on us (out of order and faster than the original Chinese server got them), but refused to give us basic welfare and QoL stuff that the Chinese server also got, so this didn't help my perception. I ended up feeling less and less good about the idea of spending money (something I was initially open to) and held out as f2p until I quit, but ultimately I realized I was throwing in excessive amounts of time trying to keep up with all of the events without spending money, and it was affecting my daily life.
I don't want to dive too deep into all the problems I had with this game. I did have fun with it for a while, especially early on, and I do recognize it's pretty good quality compared to other similar games. You might enjoy this game if you only care about getting some clothing items to play dressup, or are just very zen about monetization. However, if you have concerns about gambling addiction, or will be annoyed about increasing monetization and paywalls, you probably shouldn't get into this game.
It's a shame, because I do think it has good ideas. I never got into Shining Nikki because I had heard it was super expensive, even worse than LN, and I didn't really trust Paper/Elex by then. I also played some of the earlier games, which were not as advanced in terms of quality, but had some more of the energy of early LN - I'm not sure where they went wrong, but at some point monetization took priority over actual good game design. I'd love to see someone else create a game with a similar concept and art quality but better managed monetization.
Nikki is probably still the top dress up game franchise out there in terms of quality, but honestly that's kind of sad because Nikki is top notch in terms of artwork but actually pretty crap in terms of anything else. Even purely in terms of story writing and game design, and introduction of new characters - I often like where they're trying to go but find they usually don't execute. The story was always a bit out there, but it just got weirder and less coherent, and it became clear they didn't have a very good plan and were making things up as they went. It was particularly bad on the global server, where we got story-relevant events and gameplay elements out of order, resulting in even more confusion. I think shortly before I quit there was a "resolution" to the vampires vs elves storyline, but I felt like there never WAS a true vampires vs elves storyline - it was mentioned a couple times, but the story didn't really tie in to anything or go anywhere. Later chapters also got significantly shorter with fewer levels and less story progression, seemingly to drag everything out further.
The game design also has a lot of interesting elements that Nikki proceeded to just ignore after a while, and never do an QoL updates for or otherwise fix. For example, there is an arena (for points-based PVP) and a competition (for style-based PVP), and both of these scaled poorly as the population increased, but Nikki never went back to fix these, and at some point seemed to abandon ever adding new rewards. Nikki also had really bad powercreep, to the point where you basically had to save up for the big "hell events" (basically big spending events where you could get expensive new outfits that were usually some of the best for both points and popular styling, aside from paid outfits) if you wanted to remain competitive. This also meant that the side content became less and less worthwhile.
And that's where things tie into the terrible monetization. I won't get too deep into this, but basically everything got more expensive. LN used all the tricks in the microtransaction-based mobile game book, and they got more and more grating as prices went up and a larger and larger proportion of items were locked being a paywall. I was also playing pretty early on, when they chose to dump all the expensive limited events on us (out of order and faster than the original Chinese server got them), but refused to give us basic welfare and QoL stuff that the Chinese server also got, so this didn't help my perception. I ended up feeling less and less good about the idea of spending money (something I was initially open to) and held out as f2p until I quit, but ultimately I realized I was throwing in excessive amounts of time trying to keep up with all of the events without spending money, and it was affecting my daily life.
I don't want to dive too deep into all the problems I had with this game. I did have fun with it for a while, especially early on, and I do recognize it's pretty good quality compared to other similar games. You might enjoy this game if you only care about getting some clothing items to play dressup, or are just very zen about monetization. However, if you have concerns about gambling addiction, or will be annoyed about increasing monetization and paywalls, you probably shouldn't get into this game.
It's a shame, because I do think it has good ideas. I never got into Shining Nikki because I had heard it was super expensive, even worse than LN, and I didn't really trust Paper/Elex by then. I also played some of the earlier games, which were not as advanced in terms of quality, but had some more of the energy of early LN - I'm not sure where they went wrong, but at some point monetization took priority over actual good game design. I'd love to see someone else create a game with a similar concept and art quality but better managed monetization.