Crown of Pain

Crown of Pain is a match-3 game with the lightest dusting of strategy and not a hint of RPG. As a match-3 with only 4 colors it's not particularly challenging. Its minimalist presentation is very consistent if not particularly original. It is also somewhat buggy, at least on Mac: quite often a tile drag is only accepted on second or third try; settings and game state are not saved. Luckily the game can be finished in only a couple of hours so you probably won't miss the missing savegame. If you are looking for a quick cheap diversion this might hit the spot.

A party of 4 heroes out of 6 uses 4 skills out of 12 to plow through about 50 battles arranged in a linear order, each battle having between 1 and 6 phases. Contrary to the description, there are no RPG elements whatsoever or story choices to be made. Strategy layer is rather shallow, too - I never needed to switch my initial selection of heroes or skills. A lucky tile cascade can kill anything, including bosses, so instead of strategizing it is quicker just to replay until you get lucky. The game can be finished in two evenings, and the gameplay is a loop of fight/upgrade statistics. One can't help the feeling that the project was more ambitious, but the randomness of the game mechanics steamrolled over the nuances the authors wanted to bring out. There are control problems: one move in about 4 will not register immediately and will need to be repeated (tested on two computers). Also, the game is not suitable for the 4:3 displays. Having said all that, playing this game was fun for me, and the price is reasonable. You can pick it up for a short session of a few minutes of casual fun, it doesn't tax your brain too much, and even defeats give you a noticeable progress.

No replaying old stages to grind faith, so its easy to mess up as i took the cleric as my second hero...Tough luck...No several savegames, no confirmation if you want to start a new game...I also had the problem with the mac version where tiles would frequently not move until the xth try.