by Lanae Celeste

Created on: June 14, 2008   Last Updated: June 23, 2008

Overall, Battle of Tiles gets a rating of 1/5.

Does pitting your army of knights, archers, and wizards against legions of skeletons and slime sound exciting? Well somehow, the game Battle of Tiles by Bimboosoft turns this scenario into an exercise in drudgery.

Battle of Tiles starts out with no story line and provides absolutely no goals for the player. The only high point of this game is the adventure music that evokes images of exhilarating journeys on high seas. Aside from that, the overly simplistic, boring 2D graphics in this side-scroller are uninspired and dull-colored; a perfect match for the extremely slow and monotonous game play.

The game starts out on a grid-board laid out with an assortment of tiles bearing crude illustrations: fighters, archers, knights, and a tile named "Arthur". Each tile has statistics such as strength, dexterity, hit points, etc. The player has the option of moving each tile individually around the grid board or the player can group them altogether and move them as one unit. The tiles can be moved up or down, forwards or diagonally, but never backwards.

As the player advances the tiles forward, random "enemy" tiles are encountered. Most of these tiles are either slimes or skeletons, with occasional wizards and priests thrown in. The player accumulates a certain amount of money for each "kill", which occurs when the player's tiles bump up against enemy tiles or shoot arrows at them until they break. Once enough money has been earned, the player can double-click on enemy tiles to purchase them and add them to the player's army.

And that's all there is to the game. Keep moving forward and either kill or buy the enemy. The board never changes. The music never changes. The game play never becomes more difficult. The player never becomes interested.

The idea of a tile-fighting game is an interesting one that seems to echo popular card games like Magic: The Gathering, but Battle of Tiles is a complete flop in every way. It is neither innovative nor creative and it fails to even remotely emulate the popular card games that it seems to want to be.

Even though Bimboosoft offers this title for only $4.95, it is definitely a game that any sort of gamer should pass on. If someone were brave enough to venture out and purchase this lazily designed game, the phrase "you get what you pay for" is bound to echo through his or her brain. The only people who might get something out of Battle of Tiles are insomniacs looking for a cure.

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