[Tiny Teardown] Puzzle Breakers (RJ Games)
What you are reading is a small breakdown of Puzzle Breakers by RJ Games. This deconstruction is a light review of what the game is, the systems, the monetisation, and strengths and weaknesses.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Puzzle Breakers is a hero collection puzzle RPG that follows in the steps of Puzzle & Empire and Puzzle & Dragons
The game was first launched by Playrix (covered by Deconstructor of Fun) and afterwards taken over by RJ Games (Part of Nexters, and part of the investors of Nexters is the founders of Playrix)
The game is heavily inspired by Empires & Puzzles by Small Giant Game with a newly created IP that is more friendly and casual looking, with potentially the hope to decrease CPI for users in this genre
GAME DESCRIPTION
In Puzzle Breakers you're about to join legendary PvP battles with real players, go on raids to fight incredible creatures and take part in clan wars. Fight against other players or monsters, summon epic heroes to participate in massive PvP battles.
This gem of a game has it all: use bold strategy to beat levels, level up your skills with magic, slay dragons, and defeat evil lords in legendary combat! Bring everything you’ve got to come out on top!
Game features: Heroes: Summon legendary and epic heroes and create the strongest squad there is to crush the enemies. PvP online: Fight other players from all over the world in real-time. Clans: Play with friends, take part in clan wars and defeat enemies. Raids: Joint clan raids on bosses and monsters. You will meet many creatures - dragons, scary trolls, and goblins. Who knows who else is waiting for you in the fantasy world of Puzzle Breakers. Match-3 puzzles: Challenging puzzle quests. Match-3 RPG games combine everything that modern players are looking for. Campaign: Hundreds of levels will challenge you in the fields of dangerous battles. Exciting adventures await!
It's time to protect your kingdom. Summon legendary heroes into the best squad in the world. Win clan wars and fight against real players in PVP duels.
CORE LOOP
The core loop of Puzzle Breakers is nothing new in the genre, but leans heavily on best practices in the puzzle RPG and hero collection genre. Before we jump into how the core gameplay works, we will just take a look at a comparison of how the game stands against Empires & Puzzle from Small Giant Games in terms of UI and UX for the map and the levels (Puzzle Breakers on the top and Empires & Puzzles at the bottom).
Puzzle Breakers have simplified the flow, and is using a linear saga map approach for the user to progress through the campaign, and once in the map, the game has one screen for the enemies, rewards, and team to go into the level instead of the two screens that Puzzle & empires relies on.
Not surprisingly, the game follows the same structure as in Empires and Puzzles
Play levels to get resources
Use those resources in the hero management cycle to improve your roster
Overcome levels as you are now stronger
Different heroes have different value in the game depending on the factor they belong to
The core gameplay follows classic puzzle RPG rules where each character has an element attributed to them, and the elements are good against some and weak against others
The strong/weak relation are as follow
Blue is strong against red but weak against green
Red is strong against green but weak against blue
Green is strong against blue but weak against green
Purple is strong against Yellow
Yellow is strong against Purple
The game starts off in Londale Woods and upon deafeating the first boss, you enter into Frostbite Valley and afterwards Jeldova Wasteland. The lands on their own have a color attribute connected to them and at the end of each level sits a boss to fight.
The core gameplay early on transitions into a full auto-play experience in order to progress through the campaigns. The grind is real in these games and unfortunately, there is no option to speed up the gameplay in this title (Huge opportunity to put higher speeds behind paywalls for convenience play as for instance Puzzle & Zombies has with 3x speed behind a paywall).
As opposed to many other puzzle RPGs, you are unable to replay levels once you have cleared them (much like Best Fiends). This means that the campaign is not where you do your grinding for material or hero shards.
One big difference in this game compared to other titles is that your team has one collective health bar (in other games, each individual hero has its own health bar). That means that certain characters will not be wiped out during the level, but you will keep the entire team until the end of the level or until full defeat.
HERO MANAGEMENT
Each character is classified into several categories
Class
One of five colors (Red / Green / Blue / Yellow / Purple)
Rarity
Groups
You can improve your character power level in several ways
Level up
Fuse to increase star amount
Rank up
Attach equipment (which can be forged to better equipment)
Expand talent tree
Unlock passive skills (hero level 100)
Improve masteries (hero level 80)
You upgrade the levels of your characters by training them, which costs food and coins. This raises the character’s overall power level which determines its overall strength. However, you cannot just blindly blitz through and upgrade your character as much as you want, as the overall character level that you can upgrade is limited by the rank of the hero. In order to increase the rank you need to use coins and power stones. This then increases the max hero level, while also boosting the general stats of the hero.
At points, you will not be able to rank up your hero unless you increase the star ranking, which requires other heroes (hence duplications/higher star heroes that are not used have value in the game as currencies)
The characters also belong to a family, but there are no overall collection bonuses in this game (as can be found in e.g., DC Heroes & Villains) by obtaining all the characters.
There are, however, quite a lot of heroes to collect in this game, and they come in different rarities
Exclusive heroes: 32
Mythic heroes: 11
Legendary heroes: 17
Epic heroes: 16
Rare heroes: 15
Uncommon heroes: 16
Character Collection
The main source of obtaining characters is by using the summon gate to summon heroes. In this place, you have
Basic summons that can give common, uncommon, and rare heroes which cost basic summoning scrolls (can also be bought for 10 gems or 5 for 500k coins)
Royal summon that can summon epic, legendary, and other heroes which cost royal summoning scrolls (can also be bought as offers for 150 gems, or 8 for 1000 gems, or as a permanent base price of 250 gems for one or 10 for 2200)
Event summon (e.g., Silence Summon) that can summon the best heroes in exchange for emblems (can be collected for free during the event of purchase)
Game Loops
Besides the campaign, the player can choose to play (it all leans heavily on best practices e.g., Marvel Strike Force or Empires & Puzzle) in several different areas, that all have their own distinct purpose. Some of these are not really live services as they are core to the experience and follow a strict scheduling cycle (e.g., Dungeons in games like Summoners War), some are triggered by users, while others are pure event-driven design which is what brings the user throughout the season
Players can choose to progress in the game through the following areas
Campaign: Saga map which is the main progression of the game, requires energy
Adventures: Daily challenges which has distinct loot pools (e.g., food supply or heroes), limited attempts per day
Raids: PvP where you climb the ranks and earn rewards as you progress
Guild - War: Twice per week the clan can participate in battles to earn art of war books
Guild - Giant: Daily clan battle where you earn talent points, guild coins, and resources for passive abilities
LIVE SERVICES
The game has loads of supporting events to support all the core gameplay options (similar event structure as puzzle games are taking) or to support the meta layers in the game. They also have events that give additional bonuses for making payments in a certain time period as another incentive to purchase during that period
A snapshot of what events are running on one given day:
Gift shop: Collect event resources and exchange them for exclusive rewards (resources can also be obtained through purchases)
Gift season: Complete quests to get gift coins. These are the objectives one needs to fulfil in order to get the event currency for the shop above. Quests of the type of engaging in battles, opening gift chests
Fallen star: Collect VIP points and get valuable rewards. Only points received for purchases during an event count. This is a pure IAP-pushing event where one gets VIP points on top of any purchases
Season of rains: Collect event resources and exchange them for cool gifts and items which is an event currency event. These coins are obtained as a reward for completing missions in adventure mode, from raid chests, and from special offers.
Fortune teller: You get points from using the fortune teller and the ultimate reward is to get pieces for a five-star hero.
Talent contest: You get points when you spend talent points in order to develop heroes.
Fighter's competition: Earn points for winning raids (and also for losing) The ultimate reward is a player avatar
Strength and glory: Fuse and awaken heroes during the event give rewards
As a new user coming in, it is quite overwhelming to have all these options and it can feel unclear where one is supposed to spend most of the effort given the motivation or place in the user journey.
MONETIZATION
The game only mainly IAP and is pushing it aggressively on app start, as often one can meet five or more payment offers at startup (followed by event popups - it is hard to get into the game)
There are a few places where one can watch rewarded videos for currencies and they are not that strong, so there appears to be a low risk of cannibalizing IAP revenue.
Battle Pass Offer
The battle pass offer comes at a relatively steep price of $15 dollar for the basic version, and either $50 dollar for the legendary version or $70 dollar for the legendary that carries additional bonuses.
The difference in price for the two lanes are quite big (you can either buy three basic versions and save $5 dollar or you buy one legendary pass), while to the casual user, the value proposition for the bigger pass is on surface not clear (one would have to do the math across the lane to understand why one wants to get the bigger one)
The player will make progress across the passes by completing quests, that are either timed on a daily basis or on a weekly basis.
Some games have passes where the weekly quests unfolds in one menu as time passes, but this game has decided to clearly show that week 1-4 unlocks as time passes, and then introduces an option (royal charter) to complete quests early on (i.e., skipping the time gate) and it also adds all progress made in the time before the gate unlocks. That means that quest progress that normally would be lost in the weeks before the gate unlocks is now accounted for, effectively making it easier to complete the quests when they appear.
Bundles
Bundles are plenty, and a player will be hit with all kinds of price points early on, so unclear if the game is targeting based on user properties, but on surface, it seems like it does not
Rewarded videos
The game, as mentioned before, has a few rewarded video options but does not rely on them heavily. They appear, compared to other options, to give a relatively low amount of resources and are capped at 7 on a daily basis
Gifts from above: Each ad watch gives food and hard currency and after five watches the user will get a chest that gives additional rewards
Ad watch option in the coin shop: Coins
Ad watch option in the food shop: Food
Interstitials
The game does not use interstitials
Other
The game does not use banners
The game does not use offer wall
The game does not use other formats
STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES
Strengths
The game is well-polished
The feature set is very rich
The game runs well and has done a good job re-imagining how successful titles in the space works
Weakness
The market feels very competitive and thus finding profitable traffic in today's world feels challenging
The game complexity is quite high and it does not feel as intuitive as a player should spend time in the early stages as so many features are unlocked early on