Devil Invasion Review

The end is nigh! Horrible, unspeakable devils have risen from the depths to lay waste to our cities. As you draw your bow or start to mumble a fireball spell, you might pause for a moment, because these devils are downright adorable-- they look more like a line of plush dolls than the end of the world. It’s hard to have to fight back when they disarm you so effectively with their cuteness.

But fight back you must. In Devil Invasion you have to frantically match colored tiles as quickly as possible to hold off the hordes. Instead of the normal square-shaped tiles, Devil Invasion mixes things up with six-sided tiles that can move in six different ways: up, down, and diagonally. This simple change opens up a world of patterns and combinations you have never seen in a game like Bejeweled 2 or Puzzle Quest.

And speaking of Puzzle Quest, we can guess that the developers of Devil Invasion are fans themselves. The spells and attacks, which range from a volley of arrows to a snowstorm, are cast by spending red, green, yellow, and blue magic that you earn from creating tile matches. You can also earn cash to upgrade your spells by matching moneybags, or deal direct damage to the invading devils by matching shields.

Unlike Puzzle Quest, Devil Invasion is a much more frantic game. You only have a few minutes before the monsters tear down your castle, so in each level you have to start matching immediately and never stop until it’s over. A combo meter will let you deal more damage if you’re on a roll, but it falls quickly, and you almost never have a second to spare.

While this keeps things exciting, it also leads to some questionable gameplay balancing. While we coasted through the game just fine on Easy mode, on Medium difficulty the game was incredibly tough. Somehow we just couldn’t stop the devils, even by making matches nearly every second. You can always replay earlier levels to grind for more cash, but it’ll take a while if you don’t make the right upgrade decisions early on, and you might be forced to restart from the beginning anyways.

Beyond a few different environments and background soundtracks, the levels don’t really change much over the course of the game. At the end of Devil Invasion, as in the beginning, you’re still just playing Match-3 as fast as you can.

We really liked the six-way sliding and intense action of Devil Invasion, but feel that its unbalanced medium difficulty and repetitive nature keep it from being a Must Have game. Still, we can easily recommend it to anyone looking for a good Match-3 gimmick to make sliding around colored blocks entertaining again.