I don't normally play multiplayer games, and I downloaded Castle Crush thinking it was single-player. However, I played it for probably a dozen hours and enjoyed the hell out of it. The combination of strategy and luck (in terms of using a deck that has a range of options from cheap and quick units, to expensive and powerful units) proved to be surprisingly addicted. I sunk $27 into this because I found the piggy-bank reward system to be irresistibly good value (for the first five levels anyway), and while it certainly gave me a short-term edge, levelling up cards wasn't enough to guarantee me a win every time.

Here I encountered one of the game's drawbacks: the real-time waiting. While I could play matches indefinitely, I could only hold four prizes at a time, so any wins after that would yield only a small coin bonus. Eventually, if I won enough games I'd stop getting even the odd coins, too. This, combined with the daily reset for the store (sometimes offering average units, other times offering game-changing ones) meant the game was less rewarding the more I played it. It felt like the game was encouraging me to stop playing and wait for the daily reset, and I found this frustrating and impeding. And yet, I enjoyed the gameplay so much I played it anyway, even if I didn't get any reward except the rising elation and crushing depression of watching my rank rollercoaster up and down after a few lucky or unlucky rounds.

At two minutes per match, I really found the short bites satisfying and would open the app several times throughout the day whenever I had a few minutes. However, I've decided to uninstall it because I reached a plateau that probably wouldn't be surpassed without many hours of hard effort for minor gains. At around 1600 rank points, I unlocked all the units I want for my strategy, and the gameplay didn't hold much variety. To get to the next level castle, I would have needed to open dozens, maybe hundreds of chests to increase my units by a single level and give me the slightest edge. Gems and coins had little value, and as much as I enjoyed the gameplay the endless roller-coaster of winning-a-few-losing-a-few-but-never-really-advancing was starting to wear on me.

8/10