Best Out of 10,000,000?

10,000,000. Even the name is intimidating. I was never any good at maths in school, so I see the title and I'm immediately reading it as "ten-thousand-thousand" and feel like a fool. First released in January 2013, and has been sat in my Steam library until a few months ago. The aim of the game? To score 10,000,000 points in one run.

(In case you're as maths inept as I am, the game is called "ten million.")

What's the best way to describe it? At it's core, it's a puzzle game similar to Bejewelled; you have a large grid of squares (8x7), and each square has a tile on it. Match three or more identical tiles and you get points. These matched tiles disappear and more tiles drop to fill the gaps. When you first start playing it, the core difference from every other Bejewelled clone is that instead of clicking two side-by-side tiles and swapping their positions, you move the entire row or column further up, down, left or right respectively.

This on its own would be a pretty nice puzzle game. We're all familiar with the basic concept of tile-matching games, moving entire rows adds a little more challenge to it (i.e. you can make multiple matches in different places on the board at the same time, and the strategy of building up a large block of tiles to match at the bottom of the screen isn't going to be possible). But again there's a further layer to it.

10,000,000 is a dungeon crawler. Your character runs across the top of the screen and encounters obstacles. To take an action you need to match the appropriate tiles. A locked chest? Match some keys. A monster? Use the magic wands or swords to attack it. Shields increase your defensive power, backpacks give you a chance to find magic items. Wood and stone give you... well they give you wood and stone. You can use this to upgrade the mysterious castle you wake up in at the start of the game.

What do these upgrades give you, you ask? Well that depends. There's a room that upgrades your magic wand tiles so it does more damage and can inflict status effects. Another does something similar for the blue swords. A third increases the defensive boost you get from shield tiles. There's a room that upgrades your characters armour, delaying monster attacks and meaning you get pushed back less (and I want to talk about those two rooms a little later). One room lets you get special abilities by trading XP gained from monsters, stuff ranging from getting extra time/health/distance (again, I want to talk about that a little later) when you match five tiles in a row to simple stuff like increased damage or reduce building time.

The last room you can unlock gives you potions, providing both positive and negative effects, wood and stone tiles give you 10% extra gold, but no wood and stone. Or a potion that makes you immune to ranged attacks, but melee attacks do double damage to you. It's grindy. It's addictive. It's just the sort of game I can really get stuck into for hours at a time. Honestly, if you need something to scratch that puzzle-game itch and that desire for a new RPG and something to level up, this can probably kill two birds with three stone tiles in a row.

I do genuinely enjoy it, which is why it would be remiss of me to not mention a few issues I'm having with it. I said I wanted to get back to two rooms, the shield room and the armour room. I know it's my fault for forgetting the tutorial, but I'm not entirely sure what the shields do, even when I look at what upgrades I have available for myself.

Furthermore, I'm not sure how much progress I'm making in terms of leveling up my character. I must be getting better because I'm hitting milestones and getting further into the harder levels of the game. But at the same time I don't feel like anything's changed just yet. Enemies can still murder me, and my attacks take a while to come through. Quick epiphany, I think this is because I'm systematically improving and upgrading aspects of the character one by one instead of leveling up whatever I'm able to/

I'm not the best gamer. Oops.

Apart from that minor issue, I feel the gameplay is solid. The difficulty builds as you fight steadily stronger monsters (and those bloody overpowered, bloody Treants!), but there's an initial difficulty spike earlier on when you're struggling to understand what's going on.

My only gripe with the game is that the synthesised 8-bit music bugs me a little bit. But I'll admit that's my own personal preference and I'm not a fan of that kind of music (However there only seems to be three or four songs, and they're getting a little repetitive now).

After a certain point you don't need Wood, Stone, XP or even Gold. This helps with providing a definitive endgame. And would normally be a little frustrating (for me at least) as I'm still getting masses of the stuff. However, it provides a nice synergy with the potions room I mentioned earlier. When you don't need any more wood or stone, the potion that reduces the amount of wood and stone you get effectively loses it's negative drawback and becomes wholly good. This is countered by the fact that the wood and stone tiles now become obstacles requiring you to clear them because you won't get anything from them!

There's clearly been some design choices that don't just distance it from Bejewelled but work to improve the gameplay. And like a lot of games you don't really notice them until you've been playing for a six hour long stretch... oh... oh.

I should probably finish up by recommending 10,000,000 to anyone who can't decide if they want a simple-to-learn but hard-to-master puzzle game, or a fun level-grind focused dungeon crawler. Then I should get some sleep.

With any luck my dreams won't be full of tiles...

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10,000,000 is a game by Eighty-Eight Games, it's available on Steam, iOS App Store, and Google Play.