Your Heroes Are Fully Addictive

Lately in most of my spare moments, or often when I’m trying to kill time, I’ll play Marvel Puzzle Quest on my phone.

It started off through boredom and a quick browse of the Google Play store. At the time, I had been catching up on Marvel comics, in particular Hawkeye, She-Hulk and Black Widow (which are all fantastic, by the way and you should totally read them, especially Hawkeye). Anyway, it happened that this game was available and that it was a Marvel fix made me feel a little better about playing a match-3 game. Candy Crush, eat your heart out. No cloying sense of shame for me playing this time-killer, even if there is the regular nudge from the app reminding me to sink some time into it. ‘Your heroes are fully recovered!’ it says, ‘Fight!’

Playing the game turned out to be pretty fun, in fact. In Puzzle Quest, you have a roster of characters and you play against CPU characters or other players in order to gain rewards such as Iso-8 which you can use to level up your characters, or ‘covers’ – comic book cover art depicting characters which you can use to unlock powers and make your characters’ powers stronger. These powers can be used in matches: if you match certain colours, your characters can use powers that will make the fight a little bit easier. It’s a neat combination of match-3 with RPG/character-building elements and the Marvel roster means that there are plenty of familiar faces to play with.

At first, all seemed well. The game passed the time, it was pretty satisfying to win against CPU characters or other players and it was fun to see my characters get levelled up and gain more strength. You can also join an ‘alliance’, a group of players which gives you bonuses and you can also ask your alliance members to send you power ups that might help during difficult matches. But then I hit a wall: my characters couldn’t level up without unlocking certain covers. My characters also weren’t strong enough to beat other players or progress in the story without levelling up. But the chance of getting the necessary covers was incredibly slim. It was then that the game’s ‘free-to-play’ element reared its ugly head. And damn, was it ugly.

There are two forms of ‘currency’ in the game: Iso-8 and Hero Points. Iso-8 lets you level up your characters (provided you’ve unlocked/upgraded their powers using covers) or 500 Iso-8 will get you a ‘standard’ cover. You can get Iso-8 through winning matches or completing story missions. Iso-8 is still easier to get than Hero Points though – the game’s ultimate currency which allows you more slots in your roster for characters, and access to better covers, or at least better in the sense that you have a better chance of unlocking better characters (although the odds for the better characters are incredibly slim). Hero Points also allow you to upgrade powers if you’re not finding the covers that you need to do so. However, the barest minimum Hero Points you can spend on a single cover is 200. The cheapest pack of 10 covers is 2500 points. But earning Hero Points is difficult. The opportunities to get them are few and far between, and even if you are lucky enough they’re usually only doled out in batches of 25 points.

Of course, you can pay to get more Hero Points. The minimum amount you can buy is 200 points at £1.49. The most popular pack is apparently 2900 points at £13.99, which will get you that cheapest pack of 10 covers which might not give you the covers that you even need. Of course, points means prizes, or at least better characters and the opportunity to really level your characters and therefore level the playing field. Because the game can be incredibly unfair.

In PvP matches, it will start you off versus low level characters, but then quickly escalate to fights against players at the maximum levels, up in the 100+ levels. This is incredibly frustrating, because you are blocked from progressing because you weren’t willing to drop money into the game. To tempt you further, there are certain events where certain characters will receive a boost, as long as you have them in your roster. Oh, you don’t have them in your roster? Why not purchase some Hero Points so you can buy cover packs? You might get the characters you need… But odds are that you won’t.

The odds instead are that if you’re in a CPU match, the CPU will make a match that will lead to a near-impossible stacking combo chain that will decimate your team in one fell swoop, leaving you with only one pathetic little match in comparison.

There are only two solutions when a game is like this and you still want to play it: either buy into it, or don’t. I can just about reconcile myself with the idea of playing a match-3 game because of the extra dimension of the levelling up/roster and the Marvel sheen. But I can’t really reconcile myself with the option of dropping vast amounts of money into this kind of quick-fix game. What to do?