Duskless – The Clockwork Army:

In Brief:
Duskless – The Clockwork Army is a match three game with a steampunk flavour.

You can see a few videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

You can also see Steam community reviews of the game HERE.

Introduction:

The Game:
With a cast list that includes King William, Hiro a young inventor, Jane a fighting warrior and the evil Professor Bazel, this steampunk game challenges you to save Etherpoint City from Professional Bazel’s plans involving his band of killer robots. When playing this game, profiles can be created for individual players. These profiles can contain the volume levels for background music and sound effects including spoken dialogue plus whether to play in full screen mode and make use of a tutorial. The game can be played in either Relaxed or Timed mode over a series of five chapters filled with Match 3 gaming.

The standard format of Match 3 game play is used in this game as you attempt to meet the challenges set by each of the grids that appear in this game. Taking over most of the screen area, each grid contains a variety of embellished tiles plus an occasional blocked cell to add a degree of difficulty to the game. To create a Match 3 group of three or more tiles of the same type, you will need to swap two adjacent tiles. The matched group will then disappear, to be replaced by other tiles falling downwards to fill the vacated space.

Adding to the difficulty of the Match 3 aspect of the game, some of the tiles will be bound by a single or double strand of chains that will need to be removed by included in a Match 3 group prior to the tiles removal. There are also cells that are filled in so that they block the required passage when making a match. From time to time wandering spiders and stationary balloons will make an appearance. The spiders will turn cells into webs while balloons can be busted to reveal their content which can then be used in a matched group.

Arranged around the grid are various pieces of information and tools that can prove useful. Running across the top of the grid is the challenging target for the particular level being played. This target will consist of thumbnail images of the type of tiles and the number to be targeted. As progress is made the number will decrease with a message appearing to signify when the task is completed. Alongside the level challenge is the current score and level number while a running total of the various tiles collected, representing different elements, appear to the top tight of the grid.

As usual with Match 3 games, various power-up options are available. In the case of Duskless – The Clockwork Army, these power-ups are displayed to the left of the grid. However before they can be used, the power-ups will need to be charged by making the relevant matches within the grid. Once charged, a power-up can be dragged over on to the designated area of the grid to do its work. Included among the power-ups are a Hammer, Magnet, Energy capsule, Bomb and Lightning gun.

As mentioned earlier, the game is spread over five chapters, covering different areas of Etherpoint City, with you taking on the role of Hiro, the young inventor, in his attempt to defeat Professor Bazel and his killer robots. In order to complete each chapter, Hiro will need to build up enough collected elements so that four upgrades can be purchased as he retakes control of the city for Prince William. You are not permitted to move on to the next chapter until the current selection of updates has been purchased.

At various intervals, the game’s developers have inserted conversational interludes between King William, Hiro and Jane. In each case, the participants will be displayed as static images with the dialogue being printed in text format and spoken by voice actors. You can either work through each section of dialogue with mouse clicks or select a skip option which was generally my choice.

As the tiles used in this game are for the rather small size, it does help if your display screen is of a reasonable high standard. I found the game was better suited to a new laptop rather than slightly ancient desktop model.
Review accessed HERE 3rd September 2021, originally posted by 'mfereday' on the 11th May 2019. Edited by Whiterabbit-uk 5th September 2021.

Duskless – The Clockwork Army:
Duskless – The Clockwork Army is a fairly standard match three game with nothing new special or new brought to the genre. Despite this I enjoyed playing the game for short periods; even the story board interludes were acceptable.

It's not the best match three I've played by far, but it's still a reasonable version that is worth downloading; especially if you enjoy this genre. Personally, I prefer match three games with RPG elements, where you are pitted against an AI or human opponent where matches give you various buffs or attack advantages, for example Puzzle Kingdoms and Puzzle Quest 2match three games; ( though I highly recommend Gems of War - Puzzle RPG, which is free to play and has both single player and multiplayer modes). All three mentioned are available via Steam. My favourite traditional match three games include the early Treasures of Montezuma and bubble popping match three or more such as Luxor and Zuma games.

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game and it found zero hits from ? antimalware engines. The downloaded executable may include some low level adware that only opens your browser to Falcoware's home page after the game has installed and places four shortcuts onto your desktop (which can be safely deleted once the game has installed). The installation does not inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to Falcoware's home page when the game has been installed, it earns Falcoware games some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. You can see the results of the scan via the following link:

link to scan to be added later. (I was up until past 5.30am playing my favourite game of the moment (TheHunter: Call of the wild, which we played for over 7 hours with a couple of 15 minute breaks, so the link will probably not be posted until this afternoon).

Last week, I left a comment saying I wouldn't be posting a review due to my daughters laptop not working; she needed it fixing before the start of the new academic year, which starts next week. Thankfully I was able to find the issue; it was one of the M.2 drives that had the operating system installed to. I think it had been damaged due to overheating. I've just replaced it and reinstalled windows and it now works perfectly again. I intend getting a better laptop cooler for her. The one she uses was really cheap and only has two 4 inch fans, so I'm going to get one with 4 or 5 larger fans that are recommended by the Amazon community.

That's the second M.2 drive we've lost in the last few months due to overheating. I've never had any issues with traditional HDD's or other types of SSD's, ever since building my first PC back in the mid 90's.