This is basically the first dungeon crawler that I have played, except Gauntlet: Legends a long time ago at a friends house in Fortuna, ND on his N64. The genre doesn't seem to really suck me in anymore as I usually play two levels of Dungeons and then call it quits for the night. Still, I have made it through the first two difficulty tiers and am just a couple levels into the Apocalypse tier now.
Overall it is decent fun, adequately polished, good value at $30, etc.
I first played Minecraft ten years ago, while I lived in my apartment in south Fargo. I lived there from January 2010 until mid-2011 so I'm going with 10 years...close enough!
It was loads of fun back then as I played on a server with a group of people that I knew at Microsoft. A few years after that I played for a couple months on a server that I ran, with my brother and a few of his friends joining in. And a couple months ago I decided to give it another try, with the goal of hunting down some achievements (hence Bedrock edition on PC) and beating "the end".
Achievement collecting has gone pretty well and has made me explore some game mechanics that I never would have otherwise--textbook good use of achievements. I haven't gotten to the end yet but I think I will get it done sometime. I recently saw a guy speedrun a random seed in 30 minutes or so which blew my mind.
I have played this a lot! The Star Challenges are what appeal to me the most--I have 1026 stars currently. For some of the themes I have trouble distinguishing between whatever two colors they choose to swap for red and black; usually I can fix that by playing with the Android color-blindness compensation settings. I think I have all the achievements too, except for the Daily Challenge ones.
The expert level Spider and Freecell games can be real stumpers. Also harder Klondike can be difficult to strategize. More then once I have asked Anna to figure out a Klondike deal for me and she beats it on the first try.
It is fun to play on PC occasionally too, very nice that all my progress syncs.
While I have long been familiar with Sudoku puzzles, this is my first experience doing them at a rate of more than one per several years. I cannot imagine a more helpful UI that wouldn't feel like plain cheating. Which is to say that the UI is very helpful but I am still convinced that I am really good at solving. Doing puzzles on paper would surely be a slow and frustrating experience for me.
The achievements are well done, pretty standard for a Microsoft Casual Gaming game. I am working on doing all of the challenges for this month, but doubt that I will do them for 12 months to get all the achievements.
Anna plays the new puzzles as they come out and I play from the archives. I have completed May and April 2019 and almost completed March 2019.
For Monday and Tuesday I can usually finish the puzzle after revealing 1 to 5 squares that stump me. For all the other weekdays I play with autocheck on, which helps a lot because I can guess. Then I still usually have to reveal ~5 squares, and often more on harder Friday puzzles. I often play in the evening when I have had a few drinks or in bed while falling asleep so not when my mind is the sharpest.
There is one annoying bug: with autocheck on, if you put in the first character of a rebus square there is no way to change it. Say the correct rebus is SALT and I type an S in the square. Now there is no way to change that square to SALT, because it counts the S as a correct answer.
Overall I have gotten a lot of enjoyment from this app. It is pricey though!
