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Zach Gage has made some of the best word games you can play on your phone, and what I'll confidently say is the absolute best logic puzzler you can find anywhere in Good Sudoku. Considering this, and perhaps the cultural phenomenon around the daily web challenge that is Wordle, it makes a lot of sense for Gage's latest work to combine wordplay with some placement mechanics in a way that feels like an evolution of the crossword puzzle into a form that honors logic over knowledge.

Letter logic

Knotwords is a puzzle game with challenges that look awfully similar to crossword puzzles. A grid of intersecting blank boxes greets you at the start of every level, and it's your goal to fill every one of them in with a letter so that every string of two or more letters makes a valid word, both when reading across and down.

Unlike crosswords, though, Knotwords gives you the letters you need for every box. Chunks of blank boxes are subdivided all over the puzzle board, and in the top left corner of those clusters is every letter you can use for those boxes. Depending on how these sections of boxes are divided, these letters could contribute to a single word, or multiple ones in various directions, and you won't know fully if you've used them correctly until you've played valid words in every direction in the puzzle, which is how you complete each challenge.

Good guessing

Completing Knotwords puzzles definitely involves a little bit of experimentation, but it is far from a pure guessing game or trial-and-error ordeal. The monthly puzzlebooks include clues about the word types you'll be solving for, there's a built-in hint system that can offer crossword-like definition prompts for individual words across or down, and by default the game gives very clear feedback by scribbling out words that are not valid and highlighting letters you use in clusters too many times.

Even without any of these things (many of which you can turn off), the ways in which Knotwords subdivides its letter clusters and lays out its levels makes any error in word creation or letter arrangement something that is easy to identify within a small area of the level, which allows you to work on correcting mistakes without feeling lost or like you should just start the entire challenge over again from scratch.

Fun for a spell

In case the term “monthly puzzlebook” threw you for a loop in the previous section, let me finally explain Knotwords's structure. This is a game that is designed to be a daily exercise as opposed to being something completable. As a result, Knotwords features a variety of modes, though they are all meant to be followed and played over time. The monthly puzzlebooks are just that–a set of puzzles for the month that you can complete at your own pace, but change out every month. There are also two different daily challenges, one of which is a normal Knotwords puzzle and the other is a “Twist” mode that tells you how many vowels you can use in each row or column to complete the puzzle.

Knotwords is a free game, but to unlock features like the Twist mode, additional puzzlebook challenges, a higher hint capacity, stat tracking, and additional color schemes, you can opt to pay $11.99 once or subscribe to the game for $4.99 per year. The game itself is perfectly enjoyable and offers exactly what it advertises without paying anything, so the purchase options feel more like ways to dive deeper into the experience rather than a way to make the game playable as intended.

The bottom line

For my money, I might sooner recommend some of Gage's other games ahead of Knotwords, but that's less a knock on this game as it is a testament to this developer's excellent body of work. The nice thing here is you don't have to actually spend anything to enjoy Knotwords at its core, so make sure to pick it up and give it a try.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/knotwords-review/

I'm no stranger to gacha games, but wandering back into the traditional mold after spending over a year with Genshin Impact is jarring. Dislyte, the latest release from Lilith Games, feels like a slick and stylish update to AFK Arena, but no amount of modes, currencies, and characters to juggle can hide the fact that it's a pay-to-win game that wants to monopolize your time, attention, and your wallet.

Drop the beatdown

Dislyte takes place in a neon candy-coated sci-fi world where a sudden phenomenon granted certain people special powers. These chosen people, known as Espers, fight monsters that have awoken from Pandora's Box, and also have some infighting among their own factions.

This is the setup that leads you to plunging golden records into the Echo Chamber to recruit your own army of Espers that you can level, gear up, and take through Dislyte's story and various other combat challenges.

Pump up the party

There are seemingly 1,000 different things you can do in Dislyte, but the vast majority of them boil down to the same turn-based combat gameplay. You can mix and match a party of up to five different Espers to take into battle where you can then see if they can match up and beat out waves of monsters or other teams of Espers.

Team-building is where Dislyte gets really deep. With a huge roster of characters, all of which perform unique roles, possess different elemental affinities, and synergize with different kinds of gear and teammates, your options feel almost limitless, though that possibility space is very obviously defined by how much time and money you want to spend on expanding it.

Pulling for your attention

There's a lot to like when it comes to Dislyte's overall aesthetic. Barring a few embarrassingly over-sexualized characters, the game has a firm sense of its stylistic identity and actually does a good job of melding the club culture visuals of its characters with a soundtrack that represents a variety of subgenres beyond big room EDM and brostep (the 1-2 punch of commercialized club music that many video games seem to think are the only forms of electronic music that exist). Not all of it hits, but the variety and commitment is commendable.

Enjoying this style comes at a pretty high cost, though. Dislyte, beyond constantly tempting you with characters you could have or bundles you could buy to advance faster, is a huge time sink. Advancement taking a long time in gachas is nothing new, but Dislyte's combat is also super slow, even when set to move at its fastest pace. The game also constantly showers you with currencies for its different modes, enticing you to juggle them all the time. At a certain point, your power level also makes some of these fights trivial, so you can auto-battle them, but you have to leave the app open to complete them, despite an in-game feature that lets you minimize a round of auto-battles to do other battles at the same time. This turns Dislyte into a never-ending exercise in spinning plates that can at times leave you waiting around in the app like it's a glorified chat room.

Despite the ways the game heavily incentivizes increasing your power, Dislyte also kind of feels like a fruitless pursuit, as the game's real challenges comes from its PvP mode where you can face off against whales that have simply bought a better team than you. Although–in fairness–Dislyte has a flexible matchmaking system that allows to some ability to choose who you fight, ultimately you know the top of the heap will always be people who pay.

The bottom line

Dislyte feels like a solid embrace of all the things Genshin Impact left behind to shatter the gacha mold. Stylistically, it is interesting, and I'd recommend folks pick it up to play through at least its story if the events that took place during it were a bit more dynamic and less predictable. Since that's not the case, the best thing to do with Dislyte is probably just throw on the soundtrack.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/dislyte-review/