Titanium Court
This game is a quirky spin on the tried-and-true Match 3 genre. Narratively and thematically, it’s a mish-mash of various concepts: your character has been unexpectedly inserted as the queen of the Titanium Court, doing battle against knights and catapults, all of which evokes a medieval setting; however, you meet characters who go to business school or teach karate, and the animations that appear during gameplay depict modern sports like golf and tennis. It’s all very bizarre.
I admire the originality and personality of the game, which leans into surrealism and comedy. However, the core gameplay is not really my cup of tea. While it does add a layer of resource management and strategic planning to the Match 3 formula—the tiles represent land types that generate materials with which you build units, and part of the key to success is positioning obstacles between you and enemy units—I ultimately tire very quickly of shuffling tiles around. Furthermore, I have to say that I’m not a fan of the aesthetics of the game, which uses a magenta and cyan colour palette reminiscent of CGA graphics back in the day (e.g. Alley Cat) . I’m sorry, but my eyes don’t like it.