What if you took Magic: the Gathering and combined it with Dungeons and Dragons. That would just be like so full of cool you’d be frozen when you played it. Well SpellBlazer by Seismic Studios is not like that, luckily for all cold-blooded animals. Okay so there is elements of an RPG, and then a card game in between. If you are particularly astute you will find that Seismic actually developed Wagons HO! which I did the programming on. So SpellBlazer was designed by the same guy. Of course I had nothing to do with SpellBlazer as I was contract programmer for Wagons Ho. Actually it’s been a fair bit since I played it so even though I know there are card based battles, I don’t really remember much about it. Well let’s see what we got here.
SpellBlazer tells a story of how evil sorcerers known as Darkslingers had been defeated by the Lightcasters. And there was peace for a long time until the Darkslingers were about to return. You play the son of a farmer who is about to go to the Lightcaster academy because your mother was. Or at least I think that’s what I got out of it. The intro and music was well thought out and executed, and the graphics thought distinctively flash are good enough that they almost don’t seem like flash (vector) graphics. Okay so now we’re presented with a map screen. Where you are represented by a pulsating glowing head, with 50 gold to your name.
Apparently you encounter a poor, defenseless, wounded monster, for your fiendish experiments in casting spells. Okay so I exaggerated a little. It is a way to get you familiarized with the game. You fight a monster that’s not as powerful as you, just so you can get acclimated to the controls. First it tells you to select three spells of your collection of battle cards. I believe you get more cards later, but can only take 3 into battle. It also reminds you to remember what monsters strengths and weaknesses are. Okay I have to say something, after having to do the screenshots while this thing was in the background the music can get immensely annoying. I would suggest you have your speaker volume control handy.
Ahh here we go, the selection of the battle cards, AWESOME! Okay apparently there’s four cards to start with and you can only choose three. First is a healing card, it’s green. Then fireball, which is red. Ice Bolt and Lightening are both blue. If you notice this “wounded” monster is resistance to lightning but weak towards the ice bolt. So I think we’ll pick, healing, fireball, and ice bolt. And here we have… A MATCH-THREE! HA! I bet you weren’t expecting that. All this really cool build up for, a match-3 game? whahuh? Okay so it’s really a collectible card game *slash* match-3. And you thought I was just trying to be funny. Okay it’s time for a battle! The battle is turn-based, so no need to panic when you have to use the bathroom, or feel like having some popcorn.
Go right ahead, they’ll still be locked in Mortal Kard Kombat when you return (hah, notice how I cleverly inserted a reference to another game here, yeah go me!). If you complete three or more of the enemy’s cards then you build up some defense the next time he tries to hit you. Otherwise you attack with your cards, or you heal yourself by choosing 3 healing cards. Simply click on a card, and another adjacent cell to have them switch places. When they match you’ll score some points for your side. Pretty simple stuff. Pretty addictive game play. I totally kicked some giant spider butt! Simply unleashed 3 ice bolts and that got him. And looky! Got me some gold. Yeah baby! Play proceeds like this. I’m not very far in it yet, but here you go.
As you can see from the screenshots. The graphics are pretty slick for flash game. Actually you’ll find the music and sound effects of top quality as well. I’m just driven up a wall by the fact that while I was typing this and getting screenshots the music just grates after a while. If you’re going to leave it running in the background, please be prepared to turn down the sound.
Final Analysis: Fun, addictive, highly polished flash game. You will want to check it out. Okay so there’s no real RPG elements in it, so sue me. There’s just a story connecting the various match-3 card battles.
Name: SpellBlazer
Developer: Seismic Studios
Price: Free as in beer. (okay so you got ads and stuff from addicting games, but who cares right?)
Where you can play it: Here on Addicting Games.
Tags: addicting, Browser based (flash/java), Casual, free, Freeware, fun, game, games, independent, Indie, Match-3, review, reviews, Seismic Studios