For anyone that owns a Quest 2 headset (affordable VR woot), I'm not sure how many know they can unlock the immense library of Sidequest games that you can play from little known developers. Just think of Sidequest as the Roblox of VR development.
To actually make your way on to the Oculus Store as a legit game, you have to undergo a certification QA process that seems to stop many in their tracks. That's where Sidequest comes in. People can load their un-QA'd games up to a third-party download site like itch.io, make a trailer, set a price, and BAM . . . you're a VR developer.
On the other end, as a player you have to configure your Quest 2 in a certain way to play these games, but it's not rocket science, just follow the tutorial.
The reason why this review has all this padding is because I'm starting to exhaust the library of VR Match-3 games that are out there and today's game comes from Sidequest.
Button bombers! It's a VR Match-3 Demo from a fella named Andrew Stout. He's actually put quite a bit of work into this demo and it plays really well. Check it out:
The style of match 3 found in Button Bombers is the upward elevating style. The game that instantly comes to mind for me was Wizard101's Wizardblox since I played so much of that game. (Wizardblox wasn't the only match 3 that used this technique -- just the first that came to mind). Basically, you start with a board that is 2/3rds full and new matching pieces come from the bottom of the board as they slowly rise upward. If an object on the gameboard hits the top, then it's game over.
Besides the basics, what Button Bombers has going for it is creative flair. On the "Button" side of the "Button bombers" equation are a ton of sewing puns and head nods. Your match pieces are buttons, your training grounds are a "sewing dojo" (although I think he should have just gone with "Sewjo") that's decorated with needles and scissors.
The game pieces have sewing themed mechanics to them. Your buttons can get "pinned," and you have to make matches with them to unpin them. Your buttons can be stitched together, and you have to make a match underneath them to break the stitching. Your buttons can instead be "snaps" that act as bombs. It's a sewing themed match 3.
ON the "Bombers" side of the "Button bombers" equation are a ton of warfare puns and head nods. Your match 3 games are 1v1 battles against AI. When you or the AI make large matches, you throw bombs, bricks, and torpedoes on to the other player's game board. You travel a war map defeating opponent after opponent. Your opponents are on a sewn together ship that you're trying to sink with cannon fire from your ship.
So not only are you creatively meshing VR and match-3, but you're also meshing sewing with warfare. It's a combination that makes absolutely no sense, but somehow works at the same time.
In addition there's a strange dialog system mechanic that probably has some future meaning to it where you can earn +1 scores to traits that don't currently do anything. Add a +1 to my confusion! Where was he going with this system? Will we ever know?!
At the end of the day here. Yeah. I don't really want to offer criticism of this project. It's a free demo. It's a single dev. It's something where you can tell a lot of heart and thought was put into the project -- probably a lot more than some of the other VR Match-3 games I've been playing.
I hope he finishes it because I had fun playing it. If he ever happens to read this post, here's me wishing you the best of luck! Thanks for adding to the VR Match-3 genre.
Happy Dueling!
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