Lanterns, Challenging Swipe Gameplay (Video)

An app addiction is possibly as a side effect Lanterns (by Big Time Games) is a new iPhone and iPad game where the premise is to relax and unwind as you slash paper lanterns in this match-3 swiping game, featuring great graphics and chill music. However, this game may just suck you into a serious “app addiction.” This game falls into the match 3 category, but with a Fruit Ninja swipe gameplay. Your goal is to swipe various lanterns as they float from the bottom of the screen to the top. The catch is that you only have 1 minute of time to do that, which can be extended — but it ain’t easy.

Each lantern color provides a different benefit as follows: Green provides more time, square brown gives balance, red delivers bonus points, and round shapes of various colors level up mana. You only need to swipe 3 matching lanterns to complete a match, but you really do not start to see benefits from matches until you get chains of 4 and up. Obviously, you want to focus on long chains of green lanterns to keep the game going because your 1 minute goes by really fast, especially if you make incomplete matches or wrong colored matches, or let lanterns go past the top of the screen without being touched. You’ll know that you are almost out of time or have made a penalty when you see a red outline around the game board and hear a beating heart. Leveling up is the best way to stay alive and this is done faster by making large chains of the round, differenty colored lanterns (they change colors every level).

I like this game and found I have a new app addiction from playing it and I hate to say “app addiction” this app is “addicting”, but when a game keeps me playing beyond the time I have set in my mind to quit (for just one more game), as this game did — I have to confess the truth. While I really enjoyed the good gameplay, Lanterns is a bit over priced and does not provide enough variety of gameplay. The $1.99 price tag for 1 game mode is a tough sell, especially in the US iTunes App Store, this game would be an awesome FREE game with ads or with multiple game modes like: Time Attack, Zen Mode, Match Online Gameplay, etc. Big Time Games has a great unique swipe match 3 game, but I think they need to lower the price and give a little more to the consumer — and they may just find that this app takes off.