Thursday, April 20, 2023

Match it! A Simple and Surprising VR Matching Game

Not going to lie, I'm kind of excited to show off today's matching game. The past few days I've been doing a few reviews on match-3 VR games, and in my search for games I stumbled upon "Match It!", which is a colors and numbers matching game.  The best part of Match It! is that it's absolutely free, so there's absolutely no buyers remorse at all.

Now, just to be fair to the Match-3 VR genre, this isn't a match-3, but it is a match 2. I had "match 3" so firmly embedded in my mind that as I started to play this game I was grabbing hexes and trying to drop them on top of other hexes. It didn't work. You need to use both hands to play . . . like so:

There's zero instructions on this game, but after experimenting a bit, I quickly came to find out that you can do this one of two ways, either by simultaneously clicking on matching hexes or by grabbing one hex and holding it with one hand and clicking on the matching hex with another hand . . . the latter being more effective with larger boards, but the former being more of a mental workout and faster on smaller boards.

What's genius about this game is the tension they're able to bring into it by making the leaderboards an active part in gameplay.

As you begin clicking and playing, you're elevated up between a cube of skyscrapers. You have this feeling of being ON TOP of the world as you start clicking and begin your game.  Then you begin your descent as you slowly drop a step each time a faster past leaderboard entry is reached. For some reason, feeling your descent in VR while simultaneously hearing a descension note as you drop a place on the leaderboard is absolutely genius. It gives this really nice competitive tension to the game and makes it an experience I hadn't yet felt in VR. 

I need more copycat games that use this tension, please!

There's actually a leaderboard for each variation of match it game. These leaderboards certainly don't feel faked if they are.  If you happen to download it and see "It Stings" with a time of 8.64 seconds or better on the default numbers, 4-color, 32 blocks game . . . let me know!

Top Ten!  I CAN DO BETTER!

I found the REAL fun of this game was the numbers, 8-color, 128 blocks game. Awesome and such a workout as you spin around trying to find a random number between 1 and 64.

So there's not much to this game and it's very simple. It's all it needs to be, and it's 100 percent free. No complaints from me.  If you're looking for a great intro to VR matching game experience, Match It! appears to be a great starter game.

Happy Dueling!

6 comments:

xmenfan said...

Hey bro I remember you from the super hero squad online days hope you're doing well, nice to see you still have a blog running and doing well

Stingite said...

@xmenfan -- Oh cool! SHSO was a pretty fun distraction. Glad to see someone remembers those days! What are you playing these days?

xmenfan said...

Barely even game these days just play Fifa/cod with some friends sometimes. I was going through my old stuff and saw that I had bought some of the SHSO physical cards that they made (looks like the card game wasn't very popular lol) and I remembered playing the actual game almost everyday and reading your old blog time hound times. Winning your giveaway to get spiderman for free made grade 7 me super happy bro. Nice to see you're still active and creating content!

Stingite said...

Ha! That's such a great story! I love it! Yeah, those were absolutely great times. I loved the card game inside SHSO. Was the physical card game the same game?

Thanks for giving me a shoutout all these years later. I'm so glad you had a happy moment from that blog. I appreciate it.

xmenfan said...

Let me know if you got any links for YouTube, instagram or twitter I'd love to follow and watch some of your new content. Your old blog was the only one I think Ive ever read and checked daily haha but I like how you've stayed at it. Do you have any recommendations for any new games that you've had fun playing? I've been bored with the same few games these past years basically stopped gaming all together

Stingite said...

Just made me realize that I don't have any social links on the blog here. lol.

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