Tiles & Tales Review

I’ve seen every variation of ‘match-3’ going, and although some can be quite enjoyable they do tend to be samey. That’s where Tiles & Tales seeks to differentiate itself from the crowd. Instead of moving a gem/sweet/baked good across to switch it for a different one, your swipe makes all of the tiles move. The tiles are; attack, health, gold, crystals and keys, and a swipe in one of the four directions (up, down, left, right) makes all of them go that way.

There’s no story to speak of, you’re just some knight-looking guy roaming each level to collect enough crystals to open a portal and end it. There could easily have been a plot written into it, but it’s not a deal breaker that there isn’t one. Your character runs along the top of the screen, trying to get crystal fragments and meeting monsters, treasure chests or fonts of health, and the scenery changes every five levels.

When you encounter something (be it creature or not), you have a set number of turns before the thing you encountered takes its turn. At the end of your go, if it’s a monster your highest attack tile will be used. If it doesn’t kill the enemy, they attack you to the value of their highest hit points -- these rise as you go through the level. When you kill them, the highest crystal tile will be added to the counter along the bottom of the screen.

If you encounter a treasure chest, you highest key tile is used, whether it’s enough to open the chest or not. If you open it, your largest gold tile gets cashed in, and if you die you don’t lose that gold. The health font uses the value of your biggest health tile to heal you by that much.

As with other puzzles games of this type, like tiles are supposed to meet, but they merge when they do. Each tile has a value, and merging tiles adds up the values -- so if you have a 7-Attack and swipe it into a 2-Attack, you now have a 10-Attack tile. If you join three tiles it double the total, if you join four it doubles the totals for the horizontal and vertical lines. Joining five tiles gives a boost to every tile on the board.

After 35 levels you unlock the 600 level Endless Mode, which forces you to use the same tiles, rather than refreshing them after each level. Unlike the first portion, your gold won’t be cashed in at the end of a level, but if you unlock a chest the highest one will still be banked in the event that you lose your HP.

The premium currency is given to you pretty regularly through the chests you receive every four hours, so if you play casually there’s no real need to spend money other than to support the developer. There aren’t even any ads to contend with.

The difficulty has a pretty nice curve, and since every encounter is random (you might meet three chests in a row, for instance) no single level will cause you too much grief. In fact, the only grief I have with the game is a ton of notifications every few days, and that’s because my editor-in-chief kept asking for supplies and sending me things at odd hours. Also, it won’t close by hitting the Back key, only by force closing it.

The variety of enemies is nice, with some destroying tiles, or even freezing them in place to cause you grief. There’s a surprising amount of planning, strategy and pure luck required to play Tiles & Tales, which is very enjoyable even from a casual standpoint.

Finally, the graphics are bright and colourful, and look better on a tablet (or on Facebook). The music is fairly innocuous, and the sound effects are suitable.

I’m a fan of match-3 games, and this is similar to one while being different enough to make even people who don’t like match-3 type games take notice. Whether it’s five minutes or an hour, I found myself playing this on my phone more often than I browsed reddit, and mobile reddit is where I used to spend all of my time.