Dr. Despicable’s Dastardly Deeds Review

There are few perks to being a super villain. You constantly have to deal with defeat and the world at large despises you. But there is at least one benefit: you can come up with the craziest, most insane world domination schemes imaginable. In Dr. Despicable’s Dastardly Deeds, it’s your job to help the evil doctor make good on his plans to take over the world by building all manner of crazy inventions. The game is packed full of personality and charmingly quirky sense of humor, which helps mask the fact that it is yet another match-three game that doesn’t do all that much new.

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Quirky sense of humor bolsters typical match-3 gameplay.

There are few perks to being a super villain. You constantly have to deal with defeat and the world at large despises you. But there is at least one benefit: you can come up with the craziest, most insane world domination schemes imaginable. In Dr. Despicable’s Dastardly Deeds, it’s your job to help the evil doctor make good on his plans to take over the world by building all manner of crazy inventions. The game is packed full of personality and charmingly quirky sense of humor, which helps mask the fact that it is yet another match-three game that doesn’t do all that much new.
You play as Dr. Despicable’s newest recruit, a clever but underachieving young inventor. Your new employer has a long list of dastardly deeds he wants to accomplish — ranging from shrinking all of the blue jeans in the world to launching the most annoying telemarketing firm ever. It’s all very goofy and funny, and gives the game a distinct personality.

When you start each chapter you’ll be briefed by Dr. Despicable about what his latest scheme is and then whisked away to the blueprint room. Here you’ll see all of the inventions that need to be built to pull the mission off. And to make them, you’ll need to collect parts. The actual gameplay has a lot in common with the Fishdom series. You’re presented with a grid of differently colored tiles and you’ll have to match up either three or more to remove them from the screen. Some areas of the grid are colored green and in order to beat the stage you’ll have to match up tiles over top of these green sections to clear them away.
You wouldn’t be much of a budding evil genius if you didn’t have special powers, and Dr. Despicable gives you several to play with. To start off with you’re given a power called the claw, which lets you remove any tile you want, and later on you’ll earn additional abilities, letting you slow down time and more. Once you finish a stage you’re brought back to the blueprint room, where you can use all of the parts you earned in the match-three game to build your inventions. Most chapters feature several machines that need to be built, so you’ll have to play several rounds of match-three in order to finish them all.

The game also features two different modes of play. The more challenging mode gives each round of match-three a time limit and you get a limited number of lives. Running out of time will cost you one life, though additional ones can be earned throughout the game. The casual mode, meanwhile, removes both of these restrictions, creating a much more laid back experience.

Aside from its quirky set-up, Dr. Despicable doesn’t really do much to differentiate itself from every other match-three game out there. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen many times before. It offers up a solid dose of puzzling gameplay, but Dr. Despicable doesn’t have what it takes to take over the world.

The good

    The bad

      60 out of 100