English
Alchemists' Garden Review(s)
4.4
tl;dr for people not wanting to read through all of that:
Give the game a shot. Do you like Building Simulations, Match3 and cute characters? Then nothing should stop you. Rerolling for favorites/meta is short thanks to guest logins and an Account Reset feature. Mood is peaceful so you won't be subject to Raids right off the bat.
Two weeks in after trying this game out just a whim and man, I currently don't have any regrets. More or less my curiosity was fanned by coming across another Match3 game which was a huge disappointment and left me hungering for another.
It's your typical Builder Simulation, Story revolves around three fairly cute students tasked to cultivate a Garden as part of an Event called Garden Conquest. You build stuff, unlock more by progressing both your Garden Palace and Story Quests and eventually earn access to the World Map.
Now some people would say, but the big players farm me for materials now. Wrong. There are several options to prevent being farmed out. One is a relatively generous threshold of protected Materials scaling by your Warehouse. The other is a protection buff which prevents all forms of attacks on you. Those are avaiable by login rewards, daily Quests, Guild Shops and the Gem store. They come as usable items so they can be used whether you feel like it.
Mentioning Login rewards, the game has a Vip System mainly consisting of various buffs like troop movement speed, production and a free upgrade timer. This lets you instantly finish your building once the amount is reached. Vip Points can either be bought for gems (even free ones!) as well as an additional reward for daily logins. How many you get daily depends on your streak, so far the most I've gotten are 2x100 so I can't tell yet if it increases further.
Gacha.
Yes, the game has also that. Before you roll your eyes, you get a set of Units that probably can get the job done as well. Duplicate characters, depending of the rarity in you pulls give you shards to strenghen them. Shards may only appear for characters you own, unless my observasional skills are betraying me. Premium Gacha only gives Shards while there is a daily gacha which offers three free multies a day and also contains items like ressources and buffs.
Increasing the stats of said Units in your party adds to the damage you deal to enemies with the corresponding Element, they charge up Skills which can be used also. The art is cute and or the other voice may sound familiar.
Gameplay is well, what you expect from a Match3 game. In one Battle you might wonder how the enemy got Annihilated already and another you find yourself struggling to even deal damage.
Building part is basically a bunch of buildings having their function and you just upgrade basically everything.
After progressing with the Story Quests and earning access to the World Map you are given multiple choices. There are production facilities all over the map with different levels which basically means more ressources. The map also has random Monsters, Lairs and of course other Players.
Players can band together into guilds which have different benefits depending on how advanced they are. It ranges from a Headquarters where Members can gather to help each other out to Guild exclusive Farms you can utilize for an additional source of income. Positions for your Garden can be changed with either a random teleport on the Map or a fixed Teleport to gather more easily with your mates.
Food, being one of the three main ressources besides Iron and Wood may be a problem as of now, a lot is needed to upgrade your buildings but you will always lack enough of it. The contest for farms on the map are huge but mainly peaceful. It's a first come, first serve policy. People are really lenient in the Event of an accidental attack in the case of a bug occuring which doesn't show that someone else is already advancing to it. The community also is fairly communicative and peaceful, in the Event of something unforseen happening. For me it could stay like this but with a growing playerbase this may or may not go for the worse. One can only hope.
Alchemist's Garden supports 4 languages, English, Japanese and Traditional/Simplified Chinese. To make communition easier among people, it also offers a machine translation for messages.
All in all, the game is promising in the current state, the devs have their ears on peoples suggestions through Discord (although it is currently only and mainly handled in Japanese) and Twitter.
(this turned out to be a lot more text than I've thought
![[汗顏]](/cdn/img/transparent.png){kind=spacer}
)
4.4
3.0
3.6
Characters drawing are nice. Gachas are generous, theres paid and free gems so theres opts for f2p players.
The game generally is not hard well if its difficult its not a game anyway. Games are for leisure not stress building.
The only downside is the 'back' and 'x' button are located on top of the screen.
3.4
