I'm honestly conflicted here. On the one hand, I really love well-designed match-3 puzzle games; I can't even tell you how many hours I blew on the original Puzzle Quest, and I even enjoyed that wonky hex-based Puzzle Quest Galactrix game right up the point where the constant crash bugs pissed me off too much to continue. Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign is absolutely the best designed entry in the Puzzle Quest franchise released so far. You play as an ever-growing band of Avengers characters, smashing your way through H.A.M.M.E.R. forces and supervillains alike, gathering power and taking back S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters from sinister, interloping bureaucrats the only way you know how: by matching colored tiles in rows of 3, 4, or 5. Players familiar with earlier Puzzle Quest titles will be aware that they tend to go overboard throwing crazy equipment and abilities at you, and Marvel Puzzle Quest is no exception. Before each mission, you select up to three characters to fight on your team, each of which has different fighting styles (reflected in the amount of damage you inflict by matching particular colors) and special moves which you charge up by gathering enough tiles of the correct color. It sounds dorky (probably because it really is extraordinarily dorky), but all the same it leads to surprisingly gripping gameplay; victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat when you spot that perfect 5-in-a-row of blue tiles, snag it for an extra turn, and then have Black Widow unload Stun Darts into the opposing team, leaving them helpless while you pound their stupid liberty-hating faces in.

The roster of characters is huge, and each character feels thematically correct and unique enough that you want to collect 'em all. Along with the fact that they scraped the Marvel barrel looking for bodies to fill your roster, there are also tons of alternate costume versions of characters. For example, long before you find the Amazing Spider Man (a stun-locking, party-healing defense-oriented character), you unlock the Bombastic Bag Man, one of Spidey's goofier alter egos who instead plays as a Bugs Bunny-style prankster, disabling enemy attacks and swapping tiles around the field as he sees fit. Putting together a well-balanced team with abilities designed around what you're about to face can make the difference between a swift victory and a painful, drawn out death.

On the other hand, the game's got some of the most onerous micropayment systems I've ever seen. There are two primary in-game currencies: ISO-8 and Hero Points. You can gather ISO-8 quickly by completing new missions, or painfully slowly by replaying missions you've already beaten. ISO-8 is spent primarily on leveling up your heroes and upgrading their abilities, and doing so occasionally unlocks new characters. The other currency is Hero Points. These are earned at a rate of 50 per week if you sign in at least once a day every day, and are given out as prizes after completing certain missions. There's no way to farm these, and their primary use is to upgrade your roster size. You can only have so many characters on your team, and buying more slots costs a gradually escalating number of Hero Points. At first this isn't too painful; you can get 100 points for $0.99 in the in-game store, and that's enough to buy two character slots when you first start playing. But the cost rises as your roster expands. I didn't even finish the prologue before it hit 150 per slot, and at that point I had 4 more characters on deck, just waiting to be activated. This wouldn't be that bad, except that unlocked characters expire if you don't launch them quickly, eradicating your earned rewards entirely.

Even if that doesn't bother you, you then need to train your characters to make them in any way competitive. Level 1 characters are generally useless, and getting them up to speed with the rest of your party costs both ISO-8 for levels and Hero Points to rush the process of getting their abilities and level cap up to full power. In theory, a patient player could do all of this by playing at a snail's pace, farming ISO-8 constantly, and waiting for the trickle of Hero Points to add up, but this is honestly not the sort of game that someone dabbles in; it's a brutal time-sink, and the psuedo-multiplayer mode in which you attack other teams and get attacked in return gives you even more incentive to always be playing and buffing and building your team to higher power levels.

If the prices were reasonable, I wouldn't be complaining nearly so much, but the math just gets real ugly real fast. Getting a single character from zero to maxed out can easily run you $10-$20 (depending on how many abilities they have and how high their max level is), and there are many, many characters to buff. You can buy in-game currency at a more efficient rate by buying the currency packs, which come in $9.99, $39.99, and $99.99 (!!!) sizes. When I realized that seeing all the game's content and satisfying my completionist urges would require buying multiple $99.99 packs, I decided it was time to pull the plug. Play at your own risk, and if possible, play the PC version rather than the portable. The portable version's GUI is just painful.