This game was actually really fun at first. I made it all the way to stage 135 before I threw in my towel, so it's not that I wasn't enjoying the game...cause I was. This game is very similar to Candy Crush (and also to another pokemon game released back in 2006 called Pokemon Trozei), it is the usual match 3+ in a row but in this game you are matching pokemon to battle and defeat the opposing pokemon. You are given 5 hearts at the beginning of the game and you spend a heart to play a level. The down side is that it takes about 30 minutes for a heart to recharge. So honestly, it's only about 15 minutes of game time before you have to wait 2 and a half hours to play again. This I didn't find as fun. It's always saddening to me when a game tells me how long I can play it for. My mom did enough of that for me when I was a kid. BUT, you can spend money to buy jewels to buy hearts so you don't have to wait (jewels can be bought through the Nintendo eStore. One jewel is also given to the player after beating a "boss" in a particular area but only on their first play through). However, I'm not a fan of this business model.
Anyway, the game involves choosing pokemon you've caught to fight for you. If you beat a level you have the chance to catch a pokemon to add to your roster. Each pokemon has a set catch rate percent and then a bonus percent is added on for how many moves you were under the target move limit. This is fine too! I like that a lot. It made skill matter. But then there were the pokemon whose base catch rate was close to 1%, you would literally have to beat their level in a single move for your extra move bonus to even give you a reasonable chance at catching them. Of course these are the tough pokemon that have such low catch rates, that's understandable but I always felt they were out of reach to me even if I was on a really good combo streak.
There is also the option to spend coins that you have collected from beating levels on power-up type items that increase your chance of beating a level. You can also buy This would be great if levels gave you more than 100 coins at a time. The cheapest power-up is 300 coins and it is also the least useful in terms of you beating the level (it gives your pokemon who fought more experience at the end of the fight). The most expensive/useful is 9000 where one less pokemon will show up on your play screen, making it easier for you to make large combos. Connecting your game to the internet once a day for a "check in" will earn your 500 coins so that means for you to be able to use this power-up would would either have to pay money or wait roughly a week (that is playing everyday at every possible time your hearts are recharged, checking in, and winning the level on the first try) to earn enough coins to use that power-up. And that isn't even a guarantee that you'll beat the level with it or catch the pokemon in that level. That's rough.
Pokemon Shuffle became less about skill and more about luck than I was comfortable with. I tried my hardest to line up my moves so that they would create chain reactions within my board (honestly I was thinking at least 3 steps ahead of myself at all times) but I felt like I wasn't in control of my game, like it had a mind of its own trying to keep me from winning at all costs.
Now you might say, "dude its a free game don't worry about it", and you're right. There was nothing keeping me from playing when I wasn't enjoying myself besides the fact that I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it (and the fact that it's pokemon). But I know now that I can't without spending money and that's not my fault. I would have gladly paid money for this game straight up over having micro transactions so that I could enjoy playing it. No thank you.
