About
Alien Hive is all about evolving aliens, blending match-3 with sliding tile puzzles for a game that feels both familiar and fresh. Swipe tiles to make matches – combine eggs to hatch cute baby aliens, and then help them fully evolve into Supreme Aliens.
Alien Hive is a combine three puzzle game. As the quote says it's about evolving aliens by combining them, however you can also combine plants to make magic fruit.
Your moves are limited by the amount of energy you have and the robots that try to hamper your combining.
Aliens and Plants
In this game there are many stages of alien. The first stage is an egg this is followed by a glowing cocoon, an embryonic baby, a childlike stage with arms and legs, an older stage with more developed limbs and head, another cocoon and finally the adult alien.
Then finally The supreme alien that you're trying to get. They are stored in a collection of with information text that gives you a little bit of lore. They give you abilities to help your play if you are lucky enough to get one in the random bonus slots at the start of each game.
There are also plants which can be combined into magic fruit. Magic fruit means you only need two of each alien to combine to get the next stage. you also gain energy for growing plants.
The robots that try to stop your hive's development create shields around the aliens, plants or crystals you want to combine. Three robots can be combined to create one robot stuck in its own bubble, the other two vanish. Then these can be combined to create a blaster-an item to destroy any given alien, plant, robot or energy crstal on the game board.
Summary
My negative thoughts can be explained by the below image. The game for all its lovely graphics and decent gameplay mechanics is plagued by Pay to Play.
Or more accuratly, pay to not grind excessively. paying for the basic energy boost that gets rid of adverts was enough for me to at least be able to play this game. And occasionally come back to it.
It's a pity because as I often feel I would pay more money into the game if it wasn't trying to get my money so hard.
But despite everything I have said, I keep coming back to this game. Perhaps it's just that the artwork is that charming? Who knows but the game as a whole has obviously is charmed me enough to make this into a review entry regardless of its flaws.
Link
The game can be found on the iOS app store and android.