Review

Gameplay 87%

Witch Wars: Puzzle is a match-3 game where you choose a witch in training and have battles against other magical girls to see who is the best. You have a grid with icons for attack, filling your magical power bar, potions to resture your health, handcuff to trap your opponents grid elements and golden coins so you can buy items and boost your stats.   The battles are in real time, your rival will not wait for you and on the top right side of the screen you can see her moving the pieces on the grid. You have to be fast touching an element on your grid and moving it up, left, right or left to make matches. If you line up swords, you’ll attack the other witch Hit Points, and she can also attack you, so be sure to line up potions from time to time in order to recover your HP. The first one to get her health bar depleted loses. When you line up handcuff, you lock one of your opponent’s icons, and she won’t be able to move it. Magic Books work very different, since their effect is not immediate. When you match books, the magic meter will begin to get power, and you’ll see the bars reaching Level 1, 2 and 3 Max. Once you have a magic skill available, you tap on the Spell Icon to activate it. Depending on your character’s magic element you can create fire to attack, ice to trap icons, power up your grid or make a poison attack, that will create little skulls surrounding 3 of your opponent icons, and until she use them in a match, she’ll lose a some HP every few seconds. If you make a match-4, the effect will be stronger than a match-3, and you’ll also create a golden icon, that’s stronger than a regular one when used in a match. Also, if you create a match, and the falling pieces from above create a new line up, you’ll start a Combo, and the effect of the elements matching in a Chain Reaction are stronger the longer the chain goes. Finally, if your quick in lining pieces, you’ll see a golden liquid filing up the grid, and then slowly going down again. If you’re fast enough to fill the grid completely, all the icons will become golden for a few seconds while the liquid goes down again, and in this time your matches effects will be very powerful, so take advantage of this to finish your opponent.

Graphics 79%

Witch Wars features 2D hand-drawn graphics. The magic items icons and character portraits look fine, with some color gradient and shading, but the characters may look a little “flat”, and some more shadows and detail on them wouldn’t hurt to make the stand out more.   There’s not much animation going on until you make a match, and then you’ll see great lighting and transparency effects, really creating the illusion of magic attacks. When you activate a spell, the witch will appear and use her special skill, which looks quite nice and adds to the visual experience. Most of the time though, the gird looks pretty static, with only a dull brown color for a background. Similar games used a blurred image of a magic school, medieval forest town or some fantasy setting for a background. Also, the witches aren’t animated, they just have different poses when their images appear on screen; just seeing them blink would’ve been a nice touch.

Production Quality 80%

Witch Wars is a great example of how Puzzle RPG battles should be done. Most games of the genre have all icons creating attacks, and the effect is the same, they just change the color of the grid elements to make you line them up. But here, there’s actual strategy involved, as you can go just for the swords, and then magic books, but if you’re losing, go for potions; and each witch has 3 magic skills with different effects, and can level up.   While the battles themselves are very well done gameplay wise, it certainly has room for improvement in visuals, music and extra gameplay elements to keep you interested. Similar Puzzles have a story, cutscenes, a world map to explore and dig deeper into the RPG aspect of the game; and while you can level up and boost your stats, and use some items, you can’t equip armor, weapons or other stuff like is a common feature in this kind of games. It should be mentioned that the game is translated to 6 languages, has online match-making so you can challenge players anywhere in the world, and a global ranking system.

Value for your Money 94%

Witch Wars: Puzzle is free on Google Play. You’ll see some advertising after each match like it’s common in these games, nothing really intrusive, and it’s to be expected. You can use real money to purchase golden coins from the game, do so if you want to support the developers and level up quickly, but it seems like it won’t take you forever to buy enough coins just by playing.

Launch Video

Summary

Witch Wars: Puzzle is a nice choise if you enjoy a fast-paced match-3 puzzle, cute characters and appreciate RPG elements in the genre. It is not great and doesn’t offer as much as the most popular RPG Puzzles out there, but the gameplay works pretty good and it’s sure to make you come back to challenge other magic apprentices for a dozen times or so. Give it a try, it’s free.

App Help Guru Rating 83%