MORE CHALLENGES

The challenges have turned into a fun diversion for me personally since there are different goals and mutations to the rules. Eight more challenges were added and its starting to get to the longer challenges… longer meaning 3 – 4 minutes for the hardest difficulties. Some of the challenges are more difficult versions of early challenges, but with modifiers to keep them fresh.

To keep diversifying things, black death blocks were added to later challenges and they turn the game on its head. The black death blocks instantly kill the character when touched. There is always strategy in a game about making the longest chain, but being unable to fall on or touch the black death block gets a lot more thought involved to avoid killing or trapping yourself.

BURGERS AND FRIES

There are now shooters that fire in 4 directions at 90 degrees, then every few seconds, they rotate by 45 degrees. The fireballs go over the blocks and kill the player, but they’re only seen in later challenges. The system can generate them based on the challenge and will only appear 1 per row every X number of rows. The rows are set in the challenge. That way I can have a challenge of a low high score where there are shooters every 5 lines and a different challenge with a higher high score with shooters every 10 lines. The shooters fire based on the time of the HUD so they all shoot at the same time and they all have the same angles. The levels feel more alive thanks to these shooters.

Going through all challenges on the hardest difficulty took me almost 2 hours with the majority of the time on the later challenges. The game keeps track of such things as play time and with the reset data function, that helps too. Since the time will take longer for other players, I think I’ll stop stop at an even 25 challenges.

New challenges makes for new achievements. New achievements have been added for the first star and then one for every 15 stars.

I gave multiplayer challenges a try and smoothed out the few issues there were. It worked well as a race and competition. Other than that there are now 15 color schemes that will cycle through.