Small Town Murders: Match 3

The game deserves five stars. The developers do not. This was the best game EVER, hands down. The match three was nothing special, but the storyline and characters were the best!!! I played it daily and even spent money on it occasionally. Then three years ago, Rovio dropped case 30, ended it on a cliffhanger, promised there would be more eventually, and crickets…. They walked away and abandoned the game and even developed a NEW game. Newsflash: people don’t like it when stories (whether TV, books, games, whatever) end on a cliffhanger. It’s rude and just plain mean to get people invested in characters not give closure. These characters deserved an ending, and so did the users. No it wasn’t as big a money maker as the Angry Birds multitude of games, but they never even gave it a chance. They let it run for just two years before abandoning it. This is why I no longer play any Rovio games. Instead I moved to Lily’s Garden by Tactile which has been putting out new content for over five years, pretty much weekly. Now Tactile gets my money. Shame on you Rovio for abandoning your users like you did!

This is your typical match three game with power ups and a story overlay. You’ve seen them before. Home remodeling, garden remodeling, etc. I have played all these games because they are fun. At first. Then after they’ve hooked you the puzzles become so aggravatingly difficult that you are tempted to throw your phone across the room. This one at least is unique as the murder cases are interesting and fun to solve. But this ended for me today as I tried to get through one puzzle that took me 42 tries to solve and never did. I deleted the game. On the other games similar in design I have paid to play but I can’t do that anymore. They have designed it purposely to get you to pay more and more and more. Well I refuse. A message to developers. If you want people to continue to play your games, make some adjustments. Instead of 900 coins for 5 more moves, make it 100. When what you receive for solving a puzzle is usually around 60 coins, this would make it easier to play. Eliminate the number of lives you are giving. If you don’t solve a puzzle after 5 lives you can’t play until you earn the 5 lives back. And again you feel like crushing your phone. Instead of a free game, let us solve the first murder, the pay to buy the game. 5.99 or something like that. Until a major change is made I can’t play this game. But it’s not because I don’t like it. It’s because I can’t afford to get a new phone.

I like this game but I am finding it more difficult to play. The main draw for me was the fact that there were murders to solve I am starting to slow down on the cases because the hard and super hard levels are becoming more frequent like back to back?!? I’m currently stuck on case 7, level 728 you read that right so many unnecessary games to get through the story, because I refuse to spend anymore money. If it wasn’t for Mrs. M. And her plate of bonuses I would have abandoned this game sooner. I like that this is a case type of game so you have to read the conversations between the characters but sometimes we are given free bonuses for 10 minutes and the timer is counting away as you are trying to read the conversations. You would think that that is a good amount of time but it is not at all if you are actually READING the conversations!! I think the timer should stop when you are going through the dialogue. I will look for another matching game to play because that is all it is. I stopped playing that garden scapes game because it had the same problem, too many levels and not enough game progression. This was a fun game while it lasted and the cases did keep me playing I did not like the dog part it felt like it was just put in to the story to slow you down, like talk to the dog, play a game, say goodbye to the dog, play a game. Every little action requires a game the matching completely over shadows what makes this game fun... the murder mysteries. With that being said this is not a unique game.