Alien Bio Lab

Right, so just to let you know I'm now addicted to this game, so thank you so very much hima*. I quite like match3, I just do. Don't get me wrong my heart will always reside with the story driven RPG, but for some pure enjoyment with little or no thought Match 3 is my go to; if they incorporate a bit of goal orientated world building behind the scenes so much the better. In this little web-based offering that behind the scene component is the creation of new and frankly cute monster types by a tea drinking alien called Mochitan.

This isn't a straight match 3 type game and most of its mechanics have much more in common with Tetris. The goal is to take the monster dominos that appear at the top of the screen and flip them around and then pull them down into the strangely bubbling fluid of Mochitan's laboratory beaker. If you arrange it so three or more of the same type are next to one another they will join together and create a single instance of the next stage of monster evolution. When you join three of that stage together they will evolve into the next stage and so on. There are 12 different living creatures types to create, from the original two that you start with, the leaf and the flower all the way up to, well a thing, a fat thing with horns, I honestly have no idea what it is. Then again I don't know what the yellow blobby thing or the purple tambourine playing monkey is either.


I'm particularly fond of the three-eyed duck.

At the top of the screen you have your work area in the middle where you rearrange your dominoes, a holding cell to the left, so if you get a tile you don't want just yet you can place it there and hold it until it becomes useful, and on the right you have the preview of the next domino that will become available, so you do get a bit of planning in this.

Controls are either mouse or keyboard, but keyboard is best for everything except the swapping out of the domino into the holding cell so there is a little bit of fiddling if those are your two input devices. I have no idea how well this would work with a controller since it's not my input of choice. Left and right arrows move the tile along the work area, up arrow rotates the left monster on top of and then to right of the other monster and the down arrow pulls the tile into the beaker.

The trick with this game is that unlike traditional match 3 when the match is made all of the matched monsters don't disappear from the screen, they meld into a single new entity, which can either cause or break the domino effect dependent on where that new monster appears in the bubbling beaker. The game does provide you with a handy evolution chart under the 'report' tab, so you can try to create a run on of evolving monsters, but it sometimes comes down to playing the cards, or monsters, as they fall. If you don't mange to make matches before a tile reaches the top of the beaker, you lose.

This is a fairly addictive little game, and an easy way to while away 30 minutes or so when you should probably be doing something else. It's not meant to be anything other than a little time waster, and that is precisely what it is. If I could recommend anything to the developer it would be to include some music. Playing this in silence is a little off-putting, so in the end I supplied my own, and perhaps add in a optional timed element, as it stands there is no impetus to the game play. Personally I'm quite fond of the slow considered style but for others they may like the extra challenge of a countdown to get all those monsters made before time runs out, or the beaker fills.

*yes, that was sarcasm.