Dungeon Hearts

painful and boring

I have tried this game on and off for years and it's still just as frustrating as it was 3 computers ago. (My time played is a bit off, I have more hours from offline years ago).

It starts out fine but then quickly becomes overwhelming. Once you start losing a round, you're pretty much screwed, even on easy; Especially if there's a health drain on a party member. You just can't move the mouse fast enough and the longer you play, the more crap is in your way.

I love match 3 games and want to like this but there's zero way I can recommend it. I'll install it, play for a bit, feel frustrated again and uninstall it for awhile. It's a sunk cost at this point for why I even keep trying.

I'd imagine on a touch screen you can move more than one thing at a time or at least have things move smoother.

Also not a fan of how we 'level up'. Needing to do the same mechanic to try and rush to get your characters some levels at the end of round feels terrible. Doesn't matter how well you did, if you're not fast enough moving those stars, you've got some not getting anything.

Dungeon Hearts is several different things I normally don't like all at once.

I normally don't like anime style visuals, especially super cutesy ones. Each hero is clearly anime styled.

I normally don't like match three games. This game's core play is based on matching 3.

I don't normally like rhythm games. This isn't "rhythm" inthe sense of being sync'd to a beat, true, but it does have lines of symbols coming you need to adapt to, the other part of rhythm gaming I don't like much.

And I normally don't like stories that take themselves too seriously.

And yet, here I am, honestly saying that Dungeon Hearts is an enjoyable game. Hellishly difficult, yes, but the gameplay is addicting. There's the imagination-stoking experience of the stones/medals/etc. coming that serve as metaphors for the what could be happening in the fights in-universe, there's the promise of doing better on the next playthrough, the gradual earning of xp you can use to buy permanent upgrades for future runs, a bestiary of creatures admittedly only a couple notches up the creativity ladder from Dark Cloud's monster cast who yet have notable designs and interesting descriptions, and there's simply the sheer satisfaction of when you manage to chain stones together just right and get a satisfying chain attack - and yet more satisfaction when you watch that enemy finally fall and burn away like an overheated film reel - and likewise when you apply the same principles as regular gameplay to the xp stones after each fight to level up the characters of your choice.

My only complaint is that this game can be too ruthless. The timelines can get too crowded to move much of anything, and move too quickly to get a chance to really start teaching yourself- at least comfortably- how to work with this more crowded setup.

However, a casual's wall is a hardcore gamer's gate, and if anyone reading this feels defiant, I encourage you to pick Dungeon Hearts up. It's a challenge indeed for only $3, less if on sale.

A match 3 game with an engaging enough twist. It was fine for a bundle game, but I wouldn't go out of my way to grab this.

It gets so ridiculously complex with so many things to keep track of at an absurd speed that there's absolutely no way I can see myself getting into this any further.

DISCLAIMER: This is a first impressions review, and NOT a full review

RECOMMENDED :)

This game is a hidden gem that I managed to discover a couple of years ago, and I have only just gotten back into this game, but this game is deeply enjoyable.

The combination of difficulty, gameplay, and the soundtrack is absolutely amazing and is definitely worth the money.

Incredible frustrating and difficult game.

As everybody is saying, the game is too difficult, even on Easy.
I reached the last boss, and that's it. There's no way I can beat that, not with that speed, and with so many bad runes that gives effects like Life Steal, Heal, Freeze, and other things, all to make it impossible to finish the game.
The game is clearly unbalanced.

I have just one thing to say to the devs: Before you launch your game, play it, and see if YOU are able to beat it! I doubt.

Alright match 3 style game. I played for a few hours and thats all I need. Shapes scroll from right to left on screen and you need to move them around to make a match of 3 to form a jewel which you use to attack the monsters. After killing each boss you hav a match 3 of each color to level up the character of that color. I certain levels characters will unlock a power you can build up for to use.

I felt like this game would be a lot better suited on a phone or tablet. I got annoyed and frustrated trying to move shapes sometimes while they scrolled by. I would click on them but just barely miss I guess and not pick the shape up to move it. This happened quite often and would screw up trying to match them.

Not a game I would recommend to my friends.

I saw this game on the humblestore site for 50 cents so I figured I'd pick it up. At first I thought it would be a good game for my mom to play, since she's taken a recent interest in casual gaming, but I wanted to test it out first. It's actually a decent challenge, it took me a few tries to get to the final boss and even then I couldn't beat it (each time you fail you have to start over from the first level). It's not the greatest puzzle game and it definitely has some problems, for example you have to get through the game and fail in order to gain XP for the permanent upgrades, but even getting to the boss doesn't get you enough for the most basic ones. I think my biggest gripe is that the save and quit feature only works until you close the game out, since there's no actual save feature. But, for 50 cents it's given me a good enough value to recommend it.

Where to begin. If I wanted to treat this game punitively, I'd say it takes the standard Final Fantasy team line-up (warrior, black mage, white mage, archer) and they've thrown in a puzzle game). I can't be that punitive. This game has complexity, and depth you'd struggle to find in some of puzzle games you'd immediately think of.

You have four lines across the screen, gems will slide towards you, if they reach the end, they disappear. If you move 3 of the same colour in any pattern except diagonally, you can make an attack gem. Which, when clicked, will attack the enemy you are fighting. The enemy has their own gems too, if you can't move them quick enough, or can't use your attacks to remove them from the bar, they will attack your characters and drain their health.

And I'm only getting starting. Characters level up between runs, learn abilities, monsters, mini-bosses, runes that make the game move faster, or randomly freeze different runes, or make you take more damage.

Oh, one thing I didn't mention. This game is tough. It starts deceptively simple, but it works through it's mechanics like Neil DeGrasse Tyson blows your mind.

It has different modes of play, an easy to grasp tutorial level, and a very FF-esque art style (think DS remake FF games).

The only thing I can even think to ping this game for, is the soundtrack is incredbily repetitive. You might do better to listen to your own tracks and turn the music off entirely.

The best part? This game costs under a dollar. Seriously, less than a small fries from McDonalds. If you've been looking for a rich, deep, and challenging puzzle game. I implore you, pick this up. You will have an absolute blast.

Dungeon Hearts is a match-3/RPG crossover that fails under its own ambitions of trying to recreate the wheel. It's bursting at the seams with original mechanics and a fresh take on match-3 games, but seemingly forgot to test if any of the ideas it presents actually add anything to the experience or makes for a game that's worth playing. It continually tries too hard to insert itself as something unique in a broad spectrum of derivative peers, that it forgets that the reason those games bare such a resemblance to each other is because the formula works, leaving it standing awkwardly on the sidelines like an odd kid who has been ostracized at his own party.

Broken down into its simplest elements, Dungeon Hearts plays like a combination of Collapse and Guitar Hero. Colored gems come horizontally across the screen toward your characters, and you must combine three like colored gems to form a power gem that allows you to clear away skulls which hurt your character if they make it all the way across. This basic system is continually and rapidly expanded as you play, with unique levels for your four characters, blocks that can't be moved, skulls that take multiple hits to clear away, and so on and so forth. It all combines to make for a game that starts out simply enough but quickly becomes entirely and utterly overwhelming. There begins to be so much constantly happening on screen, that it's nigh impossible to begin to keep up.

I kept hoping that maybe if I just played another round or two Dungeon Hearts would finally click for me, but the longer I stuck with it the more annoyed I became at its cumbersome controls and incessant need to constantly throw more at you than you can handle. There are undoubtedly some really neat ideas hidden in Dungeon Hearts that could potentially be spun out into a better game, but what Cube Roots has done with them feels more like they threw everything at the wall hoping something would stick, than careful and deliberate design. And even then it almost works, which makes the colossal waste of a game that it turned out to be all the more disappointing.

Very Interesting different type of game, all these people saying its not worth it, but for me i really enjoyed it, not for much time, but a real interesting puzzle type of game.
Of course i was on normal, then easy, and still with problems, but it is totally different, i love the air this games brings
Along with beautiful OSTs

A total different experience, it have those RPGs elements like from dungeon games as well: Orcs, Skeletons Dragons, Death mages with Black Robes, etc.
And a party of a Warrior, Mage, Healer and an Archer
Again i love the style of this game.

MAKING IT SHORTER:
Simple yet Complicated Dungeon Puzzle Casual game, with beautiful OSTS but it is worth trying it, since it is not even expensive at all

While a good idea on paper, its execution came with poor controls. The required analog control via mouse-cursor or touchpad/screen and the game's unintuitive discrimination between clicks and click-drags (or touch/touch-drags) combined with the already high-pressure gameplay makes this game a frustrating and unrewarding chore.

A swiping/tapping match-3 game where matches equate to attacks in classic RPG battles. The concept of having a party of characters with interesting special abilities makes this match-3 game far more interesting than others of its kind and the levelling mechanic also being a match-3 is a clever touch. The music choices and unlockables are also pleasant. Easy is exactly that. Normal is reasonable, but challenging. Hard is ludicrous. All in all, it is a briefly fun experience, but is clearly designed for the mobile systems from which it was ported.

Using a mouse to swipe and tap is awkward at times and much more challenging than it would be with a touch-screen. To truly succeed on the hard difficulty and win the last achievement is an extremely hard task. You can improve your odds by purchasing upgrades which were likely micro-transactable in the mobile version because the cost to get those upgrades versus the effort required to earn that currency is very unbalanced, leading to a long grindy haul only to slightly improve meager chances at an exceedingly difficult trial - the game would have benefitted greatly from rebalancing the cost gain ratios to make it a bit more reasonable for this version. Like many such arcade-style games, chances of success are highly based on random number generation as a few badly placed pieces or of the wrong color in a few places is all that it would take to completely ruin your attempts in fairly short order.

I had this game on the iPad for quite awhile so it was simple transitioning to the PC version knowing all the mechanics and psuedo-strategies. Which is probably why I got half of the achievements so quickly within the first hour of playing the game, hehe.

Now, where to begin... This game is no ordinary RPG, it's really a mix of somewhat-RPG mechanics and a constant score attack. Even during the leveling portions you're required to be matching tokens all the time, and the best advice is to stay on top of everything. Like any match-3 game, match 3 regular tokens of the same color to create an attack token that when tapped, will do an attack with that hero. The player can store these tokens by sliding them along the constant stream of tokens that fly past, and you can accumulate them to do huge combos. These attack tokens are more for just attacking however, as they also remove any gray tokens and regular tokens of their color in their current column and row thereby eliminating the chances of the enemy being able to attack the player's heroes. Enemy tokens can even be moved as well, allowing the player to set up combos while removing the enemy's method of attack.

While the levels start off easy and slow, the game picks up in pace and sets more roadblocks as the game progresses through status aliments and enemy tokens that require multiple hits to get rid of. Enemies also do increasing damage, and hits become nearly fatal in the last 5 levels. The enemy variety is based on random elements, and each has their own set of hexes and even altering the speed of how fast the tokens come at the player.

The graphics and music fit the game very well, and the soundtracks are amazing that I'm sometimes coming back to the game just to hear the music. Its streamlined well, and makes progression eminent throughout the levels.

My only qualm about this game is how the mouse/finger can be inaccurate in moving tokens due to how the Fatestream is continously moving, but then the game wouldn't be hard if it wasn't that way. Definitely a recommend.

It's a really cute game, and I want to like it. but it's just awkward for me to play. It really could use an additional difficulty option that slows things down for people like me who find the mouse movements to be ache-inducing.

Interesting mobile game that was better off staying mobile. Solid challenge in concept. Surprisingly good music. However, the controls do not make the transition to PC well. My hand was hurting in record time and the cursor accuracy can be buggy. Adjusting the screen size might help, but there seems to be no way to do that. The options are amazingly limited and the main menu is a mess. Consider trying this on iPad, but pass on the PC version.

It would have been a good game if the quality was important for the developer. Forum are filled with bug reports since the day it came out. Some people can't run the game at all, achievements are not unlockable for a lot of users, graphics / sound is broken ... nearly everything you can think of. Having bugs is inevitable but the lack of communication / support only shows that the developer cares more about creating a sequel (money) than fixing bugs (quality).

It heavily feels like this game is designed for a touch screen and that the PC port was done in a hurry as far as controls are concerned.

If I overlook all the bugs and only focus on the game I would simply say this: it`s extremely repetitive as you only do one fight after another, no "world" / "story" to discover, nothing. It's a mindless loop of fights from start to finish.

Buying it is like rolling dice, it might runs on your system if your lucky enough.

I didn't think much of it at first, but I actually enjoyed this game. It's a little more complicated and strategic than you might expect.

Since people are actually looking at this review, I figured I'd update it. This game is simple, and delivers as advertised. To clarify, it's a match-em game with straightforward mechanics, but it's difficult to optimize the skills you're allotted and the matches you need to make. I suppose it feels almost a bit like a bullet hell match-em.

As you can tell, I didn't spend much time on this game because it's not really my cup of tea, but it's a cute little time waster and it would require an inhuman amount of focus and reflex to be "perfect" at it. It's a great challenge.

If I were playing this game using my hands/fingers? Maybe. If you play this game all the way through using a mouse, you are asking for carpal tunnel. Gameplay is a horizontal match-3 variant.