With so many kinds of rewards, playing the game means that you’re always winning something, always advancing, always on the edge of some new breakthrough that can give all kinds of new tactical options. Sometimes a Token gives you a cover of a character you don’t have, meaning you need to open a new roster spot with Hero Points if you don’t, you have to either sell the cover for a small amount of Iso or it expires in two weeks. (Plus Command Points, which are mainly useful later in the game, to increase the powers of high-level characters.) And there are Tokens, which give you new covers-but you don’t know which cover until you open a Token. The upshot of this is that there are three main kinds of experience points in the game, covers, Iso-8, and Hero Points. And to increase the size of your roster, you need Hero Points.
You can also increase a character’s experience levels with points called Iso-8, but you have to increase their powers with covers first. You select the three characters you take into the game from a roster you start with a limited selection of characters, and as you win more matches you get “covers” which allow you to add a new character to your roster or increase a character’s powers. The trick is in what happens around the game. Match enough tiles of the right color, and you can activate your character’s powers: do damage to the other characters, shift tiles around on the board, or freeze the opposing character. Matching tiles does damage to the opposing character, and gives you points in the color that was matched. Both players control three characters, and each character has a certain amount of hit points and various super-powers. You have an eight-by-eight field of colored tiles, and you can move a tile one spot to create a set of three matching tiles in a row. It’s a match-three game, in which you play a strategy game against an AI. Puzzle Quest is a good example of how to do that. It’s to create a system that encourages players to hand over their cash. But the aim in designing a free-to-play game isn’t solely to provide an entertaining game experience. It sounds like an attempt doomed to fail.
The more I played it, the more involved I got in trying to win more, and the more fascinated I became by the techniques the developers used to try to get me to hand over money to play a game that you don’t actually need to pay money to play. The game’s Marvel Puzzle Quest, and what turned me away at first was the same thing that hooked me in the end: the complexity of the rewards system. A bit more than a month ago I came back to it, and this time I got hooked. A little more than a year ago I downloaded a free-to-play puzzle game from Steam, fiddled about with it for a few days, and set it aside.
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