Australia & New Zealand Android soft release

Mawtful

Magic Puzzle Quest is available now in Australia & New Zealand from the Google Play store.

I've given it a bit of time already; it's got some work to do to really clean itself up, but it's a promising start and I'm excited to see more.

* Loading screens are missing art assets.
* Menus are "confusing". There's no "home" screen like MPQ, so there's no back button. This often means that everything for each menu item is crammed onto one page. This means a lot of things are shrunk to fir the space. I'm using an LG G4 which has a nice big screen and I still found myself continually tapping the wrong button/icon/etc.
* Button presses/taps don't register correctly most of the time. Often I'll tap something and it will stay "selected" - as though I've still got my finger on the screen. Coupled with the issue above, this is very frustrating.
* On the deck editing page, swiping is used for moving and scrolling in the same space.
* Everything has a noticible processing/loading time, but there's no feedback provided to show that processing is occuring. If you do select a menu item correctly (instead of the tap&hold issue above) then there's about a 1-2 second delay before the game actually registers. There's no way to tell what's going on and I'm often just tapping the same option over and over, hoping it'll work.
* No one-press level up.
* When buying a new Planeswalker, you can't see what their colour strengths are - it's right at the bottom of the page which cuts off about 90% of the way through each colour's icon, with the numbers neatly hidden off screen. (Edit: derp. Planewalkers have a strength of 1 in their own colour, 0 in the two adjacent colours, and -1 in their opposites. So Green Planewalker is strong in Green, neutral in Red and White, weak in Black and Blue. Those numbers (1,0,-1) are added to the mana from matching tiles of those colours - Green Planewalker earns 4 mana from a green match 3, but only 2 from a blue or black.)

But it's not all bad. The game is fun and interesting. The tutorial covers the very basics only - how to match tiles, how to select spells/creatures - so a lot of the strategy is up to you to discover and learn. The AI will make T and L match 5's, and there's been a few early levels where one turn of bad luck will basically make the match unwinnable for you, which seems a little tougher than those first few MPQ levels, although it's been a long, long time so my memory may be hazy.

The game has two currencies, Experience (to level up Planeswalkers) and Mana Crystals (to buy boosters). Boosters have 5 cards in each and come in 1 (60 crystals), 4 (200 crystals), and 14 (600 crystals) pack sizes. Crystals can be bought at 100 ($6.90), 220 ($13.82), 500 ($27.64), 1300 ($69.13), 3000 ($138.28) - all prices are in Australian dollarydoos. You start with the Green Planeswalker and additional Planeswalkers can be purcahsed for 15000 experience each (cannot be bought with crystals/money). Only single colour Planewalkers exist at the moment, and they can only run mono-colour decks.

Pongie

Great summary but it would be good to sum up the game play mechanics too.

I mentioned this in the gameplay discussion thread but I still don't know how it all works (iOS devices).