I really have a soft-spot for matching games especially ones that always prove to be a challenge. That’s where usually leaderboards come into play when you’ve eventually mastered the game, or feel like you do already. We’ve taken a look at numerous examples before in our mobile review category and today we have another one for review today and it is Gone Goose.
Gone Goose is a match-3 puzzle game where the goal is to score as high as possible during a 60-second duration. The game features the main character Gerald the Goose as the titular character who has been lost in a jungle with his friends and its up to you to help them get out. Gone Goose is created by migme and is free to download on the Google Play Store.
Download Gone Goose for Android
Once installed, Gone Goose loads up a primary menu where players are asked to login via their migme accounts (sign-up here if you don’t have one yet) or via guest login. Guest login is limited so it is highly advised to sign-up for migme to fully enjoy the benefits of competing in the leaderboard and sharing your scores.
Gerald, for some reason, drags his friends through the woods and gets lost so by solving puzzles you can help them get out. The game opens up with a simple backstory to flesh out some details with the characters and some features of the game. Coco Loco will appear throughout gameplay to help you out and eliminate lines of gems to set you up for new possible combos. The tutorial details this and shows directions on how to play the game as well as the different gameplay aspects like power-ups and combo potentials.
The game is strictly a match-3 game in both horizontal and vertical direction. Players can match entire lines in both these directions but no diagonals. This makes the game a bit more challenging in the long-run when the quest to connect more combos would be the key to a higher score.
The game plays on a timed-reward basis. Players earn hearts at set intervals and will regenerate over time. Each playthrough costs 1 heart and will be 60-seconds long. In-game purchases include gems packs and heart-respawn rate bonuses. Gems are used to buy hearts and gems can be bought using gold. Gold is rewarded by achieving in-game quests and via daily rewards also.
Power-ups can be unlocked for use in gameplay by utilizing Coco Loco in-game for a set-amount of time e.g. 100 times etc. This unlocks power-ups which can be used in-game to increase potential score and rack-up combos, etc.
The friend-only leaderboard lists down your migme friends so you can compete and beat each others’ scores. The main challenge though comes from the global ranking which as of this moment stands at a whopping ~400,000+ for the high-score. To give you a hint of how difficult that is, my current high-score is around 19,000 with no power-ups. So, yes power-ups do matter and they will be your best ally when going for that quest for the high-score.
User Experience & Conclusion
Gone Goose is basically a straight match-3 game. Overlooking the rather comedic parable approach, the appeal is meant to be for all ages and while the graphics are mostly bright to attract attention specially for kids, it does its job well in being light and easy to the eyes. This however hurts the game’s core gameplay as the rather busy animal icons get a bit confusing to distinguish particularly the pig and dogs icons when scanning rapidly through the board. Having played the game for a while, the feeling of when I was new to it and experienced in it varied but the main issue was still there and that was the lack of define distinction between the icons. The timer also lacks presence making the game quite surprising when the counter starts running down causing one to rush.
Outside of those gameplay improvements, the core gameplay and overall experience is enjoyable and offers a good reason to drag-up a few friends like Gerald the Goose and go head to head to a scoring run to see who scores higher. Its migme integration allows players not just from your friends list but also from other regions to compare scores and make it a more open platform to see who’s the better Gone Goose player. Best advise is to casually play through the game first, unlocking power ups and mastering each one, while unlocking the rest to find out which works best together for your play style and see which of these power-up combos rack-up the most points. Daily login bonuses also help in sustaining playability if you don’t want to spend on gems.
Improvements are seemingly coming and development is an ongoing process by the migme team but this first outing is a good attempt in integrating their social media platform with an actual game that leverages that wide audience that migme has.
Overall, Gone Goose is a solid puzzle game that you’ll most likely devote some time to rack-up those points until you have every single power-up where you can really take on the big leagues. Its an enjoyable game and we recommend it for fans of puzzle games who are looking for challenge.
Download Gone Goose for Android
We give it our B2G Recommend Award!
Follow @bossmac at migme
