Casual Gamer Review-Episode 1: Egg Breaker (Facebook App)

Egg Breakers is the newest app I've stumbled across in my seemingly never-ending quest for finding true quality game apps on Facebook. The biggest issue for any gamer on Facebook or Myspace is wading through the derivitive crap to find the gems in the games. Unfortunately, as game companies copy what works for others/ mimic the games that are popular, it becomes harder and harder to do this. (Do a search for "mob" or "mafia" in games to see what I mean.)

Egg Breakers is not a social combat game like Mob Wars, but rather is part of the second most popular genre on Facebook, the collection game. Really though, collection games are a dime a dozen, and how is this one any different from the myriad of others you might find in the apps section?

It's all very simple, really. You're given a screen with three (or more) eggs of different color, some of which sparkle or wiggle. You're then tasked with using your hammers to crack eggs open for various prizes, which could be gold, powerups to help you advance more quickly in the game, or actual prizes for the level, which you're looking to add to your collection. The eggs could also be empty, which effectively means you've wasted your hammer. Some eggs also require more than one hit with your hammer. That last sentence is important, as you have a limited amount of hammer hits you can use per day, but the special eggs normally contain better prizes than the standard ones.

Like with most apps on Facebook or Myspace, the Egg Breakers team is looking for you to spend money in their store. In this case, they're hoping you'll buy more hammer hits, primarily. While I have spent money in a couple app stores before, I genuinely question why you'd spend any money in theirs. Your hammer hits regenerate on a daily basis, and I'm already pretty much done for the day once those have run out. It's a very repetitive game, like most (if not all) of the collection-style games on Facebook.

One major upside to this game is that it rewards you for logging in every day with a "loyalty bonus" to your daily hammer hits. This is something I can really get behind-a developer who rewards people for spending time on the app. So many apps in general penalize you for not showing up every day, and ignore the idea of rewarding you for continuing to play through their app. These guys break that pattern, and actually are giving you something that you also could pay for. I like that quite a bit.

The whole "egg breaking" stage of the game (which is where you'll be spending the majority of your time on this app) is done in fairly attractive flash. My only qualm here is that the eggs take too long to go through their cracking and breaking animation. I wouldn't mind an option to either turn that off, or speed it up, because once you've seen one egg break, you've seen 'em all.

The prizes you're tasked with collecting are all miniature figurines, not unlike something you might expect to get out of a quarter vending machine at the mall. They have an anime-influenced look about them which I personally like, as it seems to give the little things a personality. This in turn causes me to want to see more of the collections, as you can only see a slight silhouette of them until you've bought/won them all.

This does remind me of one point in the game that I tend to think could lead to some serious repetition. Each stage has a handful of prizes that you have to buy to complete the collection. You don't have a chance to win them at all, and must spend the gold you've accrued during your egg breaking. If you're a completionist like me, you're not going to want to jump to the next stage until your current stage is complete. (As of this writing, there are 13 stages.) The game also encourages you to complete collections by giving you rewards for doing so. Sadly, this means you'll also be saving your gold to buy all the prizes for whichever stage you're on.

Each stage also has a super-rare prize, which can either be found in a golden egg, or bought with feathers (another drop, which can be traded for other powerups). Feathers are more rare than gold, but drop far more commonly than the golden prize. Still, though, this leads to more repetition, at least if you're trying to get a complete set for the stage. I've found that repetition leads to boredom, at least in the long haul.

A final judgement on this game is really hard to give. If you're not into collection-type games, this one's probably not going to change your mind. If you are into them though, I'd have to give this game a thumbs-up, just due to the slick-looking flash interface and the stylized look of the prizes.

Final Judgement- 4 out of 5 overall, 5 out of 5 for collection-style games,

Until next time, I'm Chuck Black, heading back to the dark side.