Whether in Triple Town, 10000000, or Puzzle Forge, the match-3 game has been put through its paces lately in mashups with other genres. With Toybox, developer Barrel of Donkeys tries to take things a step further, delivering two styles of play at once. And like the made-up, hybrid games of an imaginative child, the result is at once lovely and inconsistent.
There's plenty of merit to the idea of combining genres. The Puzzle Quest series, for example, cleverly fused role-playing and puzzle elements together, resulting in a hybrid that proved both addicting and original. Barrel of Donkeys' upcoming game Toybox for iOS is employing the same method, featuring components from both the shooter and "match 3" genres.