Claws & Feathers

Claws & Feathers is the perfect example of appearances that can be deceiving. Bright, fluffy birdies and cute kitties feature in this game, which at first glance looks like a really easy and casual match-3 type game. A few levels in and the fur and feathers are flying (figuratively and sometimes literally) as you try to maneuver your pieces around the board while thinking multiple moves ahead like some master chess strategist. In the game, your chicks are trapped in locked cages and you must free them. To accomplish this, you move birds around the game board, matching 3 of the same color in order to clear some of the birds off by letting them take flight. The idea is to clear paths on the game board between golden keys and the locked cages. Making all of this much more difficult is the fact that every move causes eggs to appear and more birds to hatch. Sometimes you might clear some par

Claws & Feathers is another addictive and challenging puzzle game from Alawar Entertainment. A fusion of Match 3 and puzzle fair, the gameplay is pretty unique and fun. And despite looking a bit like Angry Birds in the art department, it is anything but. Birds are striking back after a gang of nasty cats stole their eggs, but rescuing their offspring may be trickier than they thought! The gameplay is more complex than it first appears. We're given a game board with birds and cats sprinkled about. Matching 3 of the same colored bird will remove them from the board, and to remove the cats and reveal the keys they're hiding you need to surround them with birds of the same color. This is easier said than done as any move that does not result in a match adds colored eggs to the board. An additional non-match move and the eggs hatch into full birds which will quite often block your path. Too

First impression: decent casual puzzle game with lots of levels. It works a lot like Hexus: if you make empty moves that don't lead to a combination, some empty spaces turn into eggs and the existing eggs turn into birds, cluttering up the playing field (or providing welcome reinforcements). Some of the bonuses are timed. Since this is only a first impression and I haven't played it all that much, so obviously I don't know how difficult the game is going to get, but this being a casual game, I don't really expect more than medium difficulty. The game delivers what you'd expect, no surprises, but it's not as outstanding as the 100% recommendations might lead you to believe. It runs in a window and works on older computers, too. There's a sequel.

Fun little level based puzzle game that's a bit of a different take on Match 3. The premise may sound familiar, some birds are angry that their friends are kidnapped, this time by cats. Don't expect a physics game though. This is a straight puzzle game that plays closer to a match 3 though significantly different, and I would say more complex, than something like Bejeweled. The staple of the gameplay is to remove birds of the same color from the playing field, a roof, by aligning three of the same color. You can do this in a row or in an L shaped corner. The trick is that a bird can only move where there's an open path, so no obstacles like another bird blocking it, and if you move a bird without making a 3 or more group match then more birds will show up on the playing field adding more obstacles. There are little eggs of different colors showing where the new birds will 'hatch' and s

A pretty solid puzzle game in the match-3 vein, where the basic mechanics remain the same from level to level, but each stage can be a chain of puzzles to solve to get to the goal, or just board-control where you need to keep clear paths as new pieces spawn, or even "make a path to the one key to open the goal". It's varied and while it might use similar versions of an objective, they don't repeat and the boards are shaped around new experiences. If you want to go above and beyond the usual, every stage has a "golden egg" challenge to meet as well, and it kept this challenging even for my skills with the genre, especially by the end of the game. Overall a fantastic title unless you've got some kind of revulsion to Looney Tunes "violence" (bombs turning cartoon animals to ash and eyeballs, etc) or the genre itself.

+ Unique, solid mechanics. + Good variety in level design. - Randomization makes some goals impossible or just tedious if you don't get the pieces you need. - Soundtrack's kind of annoying. Definitely recommended for match 3 fans.