Puzzle Combat vs. Empires & Puzzles
or, a “Merge Magic vs. Merge Dragons” redux
Small Giant Games has soft launched a new match 3 RPG called Puzzle Combat. And looking at its PlayStore art caused major throwback to the post I just wrote on clones:
The top 2 reviews on Play Store for Puzzle Combat are, well, talking about E&P:
It hasn’t been soft launched in India, of course. Nobody in their right minds (who isn’t Indian or Chinese) would do that. If I remember correctly, E&P didn’t event launch in India at the same time as the west.
But I digress.
I wanted to see for myself, which of the two of my postulates held here? Since the game wasn’t available for me to play and I wasn’t in the mood to download an apk from a sketchy website, I decided to base my opinions about it from youtube videos like this one.
This is super similar to E&P :
To recap, the two main reasons for a reskin are:
- Reaching new audiences
- Keeping users within the developer’s ecosystem
Puzzle Combat is clearly part of the latter group.Which means that its primary aim is to keep E&P players in the same ecosystem, and not go off to another one of the many, many match-3 RPGs out there.
What is interesting though, is that both Gram and Small Giant are under of the Zynga umbrella.
That is all, just wanted to make a note of this game too because it is such a great example of a reskin.
