Treasure Epic is a Facebook-based tile-matching game that revolves around hunting for priceless treasures. Treasure hunting is cool, but Treasure Epic‘s actual gameplay is typical of a Facebook title: common as dirt. It’s not a poor game by any means, but it’s less like gold jewelry and more like the brass-plated trinkets that line your Auntie Etta’s shelves. It’s fun to poke at, but you’re already familiar with all of the dust-packed nooks and crannies.
Treasure Epic is a Facebook-based tile-matching game that revolves around hunting for priceless treasures. Treasure hunting is cool, but Treasure Epic‘s actual gameplay is typical of a Facebook title: common as dirt. It’s not a poor game by any means, but it’s less like gold jewelry and more like the brass-plated trinkets that line your Auntie Etta’s shelves. It’s fun to poke at, but you’re already familiar with all of the dust-packed nooks and crannies.
Treasure Epic stars three generations of women in an adventurous family: a grandma, a mom, and a young girl. Admittedly, playing through the game as a woman-clan of born treasure hunters is pretty cool, especially since each character brings her own bonus move to the table.
Treasure Epic is a tile-matching game, and like most tile-matching games, it’s incredibly simple to play. Differently-colored blocks fill the screen, and when you touch two or more adjacent blocks that are the same color, they disappear. You’re awarded score combos if you clear more than two blocks at once, and since most of the levels in Treasure Epic require you to meet a score goal, you’ll want to perform as many combos as possible. As a result, there is a certain amount of strategy behind playing Treasure Epic “well” versus merely muddling through each level with a one-star score.
In addition to racking up a specific score, Treasure Epic usually expects you to clear away a certain percentage of blocks in each level. You’re often called on to collect treasures by pushing them to the bottom of the screen, too. This all seems easy enough until you reach the bottom and realize (not without some panic) that you actually have way too many odd blocks hanging around—usually with a treasure or two still perched contentedly on top of them.
This is where power-ups come in. There are individual power-ups you can buy with in-game coins, like a beam gun that clears a row of blocks, a drill that eliminates one block (perfect for when a single rebel is preventing you from finishing off a level), and a bottle that vaporizes all on-screen blocks of a certain color (what’s that baby drinking?). Alternatively, each treasure hunter also carries her own signature tool that powers up as you score combos. Mom, for example, carries the aforementioned beam gun.
Again, Treasure Epic is a decent way to whittle away your lunch hour. It’s just that you’ve played this game already. You’ve probably played it a billion times, thanks to the Candy Crush rush. And, like Candy Crush Saga, Treasure Epic jacks up the difficulty on its later levels so that you’re left spending all of your lives just trying to conquer that one tightly-packed level that looks easy, but is actually deviously designed. You don’t have to spend energy to play, however, which is nice: you’re simply down a life when you lose. Said lives take a long time to charge, though. Unless you want to pay.
Treasure Epic boasts decent graphics (although the blocks are dully-colored), interesting character designs, good music, and a good time. Just don’t expect any new ideas. These mines were picked clean of originality and creativity a long time ago.
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