Estimated total reading time: 4 minutes, 18 seconds. Contains ~860 words.

Title: Heroes of Hellas 3: Athens
Developer: Alawar Entertainment
Publisher: Alawar Entertainment
Release date: 2015-03-13
Regular price: 2,99 €
Bundled:      ☑Yes ☐No
Achievements: ☐Yes ☒No
Cards:        ☑Yes ☐No

Recently moved so I’m still without internet at home. Coming basically everyday to university to use its connection but Steam is, obviously, blocked.
Playing a bit offline, mostly games with no achievements because I can’t be sure that any of those unlocked offline will correctly sync later.

Beaten Heroes of Hella 3. Was looking for a Match 3 and installed this; turns out it’s not a Match 3: yes, you have to connect at least 3 pieces to remove them from the board but the longer the chain you make, the better.

Levels start pretty “normal” but quickly turn into weird, tending towards tedious/bothersome, ones.
Thing is, you don’t have to clear the board but to complete certain tasks per level, collect this/that and such. Not a problem, at least until game-modifiers kick-in. Those can make a level last 2-3, even 4 times longer. The worst aspect is that they change levels’ layout ingame; this could lead to a lot of your playtime being wasted (example: you focus on a certain area but then you grab a modifier which changes the layout and that area is now useless.) It took me a while to grasp this so I’m forwarding it to you so you can hopefully avoid it :)
Worst levels are those where you have to collect, let’s say, gems but those are placed in a place you can’t reach :\ the only way you have is to ask gods for help (you can do it by collecting their relative pieces on the board); you can’t even choose which gods have to help you in a level :(

There are also some inbetween HOG levels, which nicely break from the monotony of the other levels.

Story-wise, you have to help Athena re-grow her olive tree and Athen citizens re-build their city. You achieve this by collecting money while playing and spending it to buy various buildings. Every building has 3 different styles but I think they only differ visually (meaning they have no effect on your gameplay). To play more, I’ve decided at the beginning to only buy the buildings from the most expensive tier.

Played with the timer turned off ‘cause I didn’t want to rush, don’t know if this made so that levels were more complicated.

Moving this to Beaten because beating the main mode unlocked extra levels (which I don’t know if I’ll ever beat) that allow you to build your own palace.

Finished last levels in offline mode so gametime may not be accurate; on the other hand I don’t remember how long I’ve idled it, so gametime may be accurate

Once I’ve re-gained fully access to Steam, here you’ll find some screenshots :)

As said, the fear that some achievements unlocked offline would not sync later made me look for games without them, even outside Steam.
Played a bit more of Spelunky, which I have to say I didn’t like at first but it’s kind of becoming a nice time-waster :)

 is a nice tactical game, best played against human, I believe (tried only against AI atm, took me 4-5 matches to understand how things work and beat it. From what I’ve experienced, matches are relatively short but it may change if you play a different mode and/or against a human. Game could benefit of some “touch-up” here and there but it left a good impression on me even so :)
 , as they describe it, is a kingdom management game. Liked the concept, a bit less the “timer” aspect; fortunately, seems like it’s only present in the first part of the game (after reaching the goal within the given time a pop-up message appeared, telling me that I had reached the objective but that I was free to keep playing and expanding my kingdom). Here too, I needed some run to understand what I needed to do to make sure I as reaching the goal. Going to play a bit more the already beaten run and see if there’s anything else to discover in the game :)

This is the true reason why I wasn’t playing much:
Finally passed my last exam! :D
It had been haunting me for years. it was hard to take down, managed to finally beat it after I was soo close to pass it, so I sent and email to my professor kindly asking if some way to reach the pass mark existed, and he decided for an additional oral exam (by the way, thefreedictionary says it’s called viva, is it right?), he wasn’t fully satisfied so he told me to come back after a week to do another. Ouch. In the end it was worth it! :D
Now it’s a race against time to finish my thesis in time and be able thus to graduate in december. fingers crossed!