Christmas Puzzle 4

Christmas Puzzle 4 is yet another of literally hundreds of mobile app Match-3/Bejewelled/Candy Crush ripoff games infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one was published on Steam instead of app stores back in 2017, and remains something largely valueless as there's a million match-3 games you can play for free in your web browser or on mobile app stores. However, the developers of this one expect you to give them money for something you could play for free. The developer has copy + pasted this [i]exact same game[/i] onto Steam 5 times now, and all of them have ridiculously high price tags for garbage. Worse, the developer is using shell accounts to hide their identity, which seems like a deliberate attempt to mislead gamers. This is unethical. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game…

At this point it feels less like a game series and more like a yearly obligation to just make another game by this company, if Christmas spirit lives here, it’s been buried under four layers of copy paste and there is still one more to go.

I enjoyed this game much more than the first three Christmas Puzzle games. What I didn't like about the first three was that Steam achievements & game play seemed to be tied to whatever player was entered in the first game. If you wanted to play as the same player in games 2 and 3, tough luck because Steam achievements and/or levels completed carried over for the same player. This game fixed that problem by not having Steam achievements so... no Steam achievements... no reason to replay levels for more stars. Upgrades to buildings in winter scene didn't seem to do much but I did like having that as a goal since there were no Steam achievements. I can't remember if a level can fail if you run out of moves but I'm pretty sure running out of time did not fail the level. I did make it to the end with all upgrades purchased in the town. I do enjoy match 3 games and would probably play this again because I like the winter holiday theme.

https://youtu.be/KAQ1zgloM6Q Back for more this time it's building a holiday time with questionable NIMBY polices and police state choices.