A Match Made in Purgatory
Developed by Candivore, Match Masters offers players an online match-3 experience with a TV show aesthetic featuring various animals who compete against each other for… a grand prize, probably. The matches are often accompanied by special rules—some gems destroy all tiles of their own color, others destroy a row or a column, or even explode certain tiles. Matches can get very chaotic, so is it anything more than a game of luck? Can you get good, develop your skills and harness the chaos?
Lights, Camera, Match
Match Masters inherits its aesthetics from two primary themes: the lights, stages and soundtrack of a TV show combined with the cute marketability of cartoon animals. The developers went out of their way to make the experience as colorful as possible alongside a very round and sticker-like appearance. The sound effects pop and have a lot of emphasis, which is important for making the match-3 chaos feel satisfying. The jazzy music is just catchy enough to not get old too fast.
When it comes to match-3 games, the most important thing is making matching gems satisfying both graphically and gameplay-wise. When it comes to special effects, Match Masters has a lot going for it. The title keeps pace with the chaos using numerous explosions, lightning effects and many other ways to get that sweet dopamine out of the experience.
Rabbit Versus Crocodile
Before you can match your first gems though, there are a few things to take care of. Match Masters gives players some power-ups that can be used during gameplay.
Before each match, you have to pick a booster—a special power you can use after matching up enough blue gems. There are a lot of different boosters to choose from. Some of them aren’t available from the get-go though and are instead unlocked as you progress through the game. They range from simple effects like destroying a few random gems on the board, to really disruptive effects like shuffling all gems of a random color to the rightmost side of the board. Watch out—boosters are limited in quantity, and if you lose the match, you lose your booster. This is the primary difficulty in Match Masters because if you run out of strong boosters, you have to play with weaker ones instead. If you run out of those too… then you are in trouble.
Aside from your booster, you can also pick two perks to bring with you. The basic perks are infinitely reusable, bringing better ones is purely player choice. Perks are essentially mini-boosters: destroy a chosen gem on the board, shuffle the entire board for free and so on. Unlike boosters though, each perk can only be used once per match.
There are too many game modes in Match Masters to list them all, and they constantly cycle in and out. In general though matches can be solo, duel, tournament or elimination style. Each game mode can have its own special rules—having fewer colors on the board, having a bigger board, having special gems that destroy all gems of their own color when matched and so on. Depending on the rules, the path to victory could be drastically different from match to match.
The Price of Deception
I had fun with Match Masters overall. Still, I quickly developed a faint suspicion that not everything is as it seems. Many of the people I played against had peculiar names that fell into one of three categories: adjective, noun and a bunch of numbers like SuperbSquirrel929; very generic first names like Alex or Jessica; and names that actually look like the kind you would see people using online. I don’t want to accuse Match Masters of anything. Fact is simply that player behavior did often make me question whether I was actually playing PvP against real people.
Like most mobile games, Match Masters is heavily monetized. Anything you can imagine can be found in the cash shop. Most importantly though, this is where losing your boosters on a defeat comes into play: you can buy boosters. Buying the more powerful ones means you have a better chance of winning and not losing your booster. This is the prime definition of pay-to-win and it permeates the experience as a whole. Even if you’re okay with that, keep in mind that Match Masters is still a match-3 game. Victory and defeat are ultimately up to luck. Anytime the game decides that you’ve had enough fun, the AI can easily drop a massive combo, causing you to lose no matter how well you played.
There is one aspect of the monetization that I found rather deceptive: bundle prices adjust to each player’s spending habits. This essentially means that the more you spend, the more expensive things get. Match Masters knows that, as an already-paying customer, you’ll be willing to pay more. At the same time, not spending anything on the game, lowers prices to lure you in with cheaper deals. Buyers beware.
Match Masters could be fittingly called a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The gameplay is fun and the special effects can certainly keep you engaged. But it can quickly start feeling like all that is just a vehicle to drive you to the cash shop so you can spend your money, spend exactly as much as you can be lured in with… then spend some more. Even if you don’t mind paying for a free game, you might consider whether your money would be better spent on a less deceptive experience—whether Match Masters truly is the right match for you.
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