Splash of Color (PS4) Review

 

Another week, another F2P Puzzle Game arrives in the Playstation Store. Splash of Color is a game by Yabai Games, who recently also published Ecchi Crush (a Match 3 Game) and Ecchi Secrets (a Qix Clone).

Splash of Color, however, has a little bit of a twist. It is neither your classic Picture Puzzle Game, like HIQ Ace or AAA Dynamic Scenes for example, where you simply put one of a handful of picture pieces in the right spots, nor is it a Slide Puzzle Game, like Avatar Island or Slide N’ Go, where you have to rotate picture pieces till they are all in the right order. In Splash of Color you have to switch places between any 2 picture pieces till they are all in the right place, no rotation necessary. It seems like a mix of both and therefore makes Splash of Color stand out a bit from the other Puzzle Games.

The upside is that it is less headache-inducing than the sometimes quite complex slide puzzles. The downside, however, is also that it removes a lot of the challenge and can be solved quite easily. You are unlikely to take more than a few minutes even for the bigger pictures, which can of course harm the replay value and longevity of the game.

Splash of Color features 8 pictures for free, which is a bit more than average for F2P Puzzle Games. Like a lot of other Picture Puzzle Games on the Playstation Store, it seemingly used AI to design or at least help in the creation of the puzzle images. For some users, this might be a dealbreaker, but it is ultimately up to personal preference, if it affects you.

An additional 11 DLC packs with pictures can be bought for 2 Euro each. Alternatively, you could get the ‘wonderful edition’ for 9 Euro, which features 80 paid pictures, or the ‘complete edition’ for 20 Euro, which grants you access to 176 extra pictures. 

Splash of Color features a quick and easy trophy list, including a Platinum Trophy and 11 Gold Trophies. The game can be highly recommended for Trophy Hunters.

 

Result:

Splash of Color offers a unique take on the Puzzle Picture genre. It plays a lot like the rotation based Puzzle Picture games, but without the need for an actual rotation. While it might therefore not be as challenging, it is a more relaxing experience instead. That being said, you’re unlikely to play it for more than a few minutes. It’s a totally fine experience for what it offers, but nothing special in the grand scheme of things.

 

6/10

Diamond Painting ASMR (PS4) Review

 

Diamond Painting ASMR is, as the name suggests, a Diamond Painting Videogame. It is part of the seemingly endless wave of F2P Games by Qubic Games, who, after the Nintendo Switch, are now also invading the Playstation Store.

Diamond Painting in real life is mostly a mix of painting by numbers, but with stitches. There are no real diamonds being used, but instead small colored stones are being put into a position to later on create one big picture.

The game recreates this pretty faithfully, but it doesn’t do anything with it. You don’t get to choose which coloured stones you want to place and where. The game just auto-selects everything for you. It chooses the colours and tells you exactly where you are allowed to place them by big blinking numbers. You can switch up the order of the colours you place, but that ultimately doesn’t change anything. You don’t even get to press a button. You just hover the analogstick over the blinking positions and the diamonds place themselves. This becomes really boring after a few minutes.

The only thing the player really gets to decide is, if he wants to place 1, or 3 horizontal or 3 vertical diamonds at a time. This however is also pointless since the registration for the 3 diamond blocks usually took much longer time than just quickly placing solo diamonds. Everything but the single diamond is in most situations senseless, unless you actively want to waste time. The registration for single diamonds is also not always perfect. You sometimes think you hit the right spot, but you than have to backtrack because the game didn’t register it.

Another game from Qubic Games called Coloring Book also is a painting videogame. It’s by no means a great game, but it at least allows you to choose your own colours and where you want to place them. You can see how the ideal picture would look like, but than you actually get to play and make your own choices. In Diamond Painting the game isn’t just holding your hand, but moving every of your fingers and you just get to decide whether you obey or quit the game. The complete lack of freedom makes a big difference.

There are apparently over 900 different pictures in 16 categories available on Diamond Painting. All of them are technically available for free, but the game is gatekeeping you. Pictures require the use of 1-5 stars to play and you only get 1/5 stars regenerated every hour, so that your playtime is totally gatekeeped. You can of course pay real money to get more stars so you can play all the time… A pretty pathetic system, which thankfully can be outsmarted. If you just move the system clock of your Playstation 5 hours ahead, you will regain your 5 stars and you can repeat this infinitely. A game, that doesn’t respect you or your time, certainly doesn’t deserve your respect either.

Diamond Painting features 20 Playstation Trophies including 1 Platinum. Trophies are all super easy to unlock, but the repetitive and unexciting gameplay will quickly get very boring. The Platinum should take around 3-4 hours to unlock.

 

Result:

Diamond Painting ASMR is not shovelware or as bad as the the abysmal Real Cake Maker, but it is still a bad game. The game may be a faithful recreation of the Diamond Painting activity, but that just doesn’t translate well into a videogame. Diamond Painting pretty much plays itself and gets boring very quickly.

 

3/10

Super-B (PC) Review

 

Super-B is a Third-Person Multiplayer Game on Steam. I usually start reviews by explaining to which genre a game belongs to, so readers can get a grasp of what the game is all about. With Super-B this categorization appears pretty difficult. It seems to want to be a game of everything, like a mix of Roblox and Fall Guys elements perhaps. Maybe Blankos Block Party would be an even more fitting comparison (a game which I also reviewed on this blog: https://gamereviewnation.blogspot.com/2024/01/blankos-block-party-pc-review.html).

A difference to those games, however, is that you can’t actually create your own levels in Super-B. Instead, you have to choose from around 10 premade gamemodes by the developers. The variety isn’t actually too bad. You have two different Battle Royale modes with classic “Battle Royale” and “Battle Isle”, which are the same gamemode just on different maps. You have classic gamemodes, like Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Bomb Defusal and a Gungame mode called “Random Weapon Challenge”. Bomb Defusal and Random Weapon Challenge are FPS gamemodes, while all others are played as third-person shooters.

Another really weird gamemode was Hide and Seek, which I didn’t fully understand, but you seem to have to blend into a crowd of NPCs. At some point there was also a Call of Duty Zombies Rip-Off gamemode called ‘Monster Survival’, which played like a bad Roblox imitation of said gamemode. Additionally, there are also 2 Parkour based gamemodes in Super-B. ‘Obstacle Race’ is a scuffed version of classic Fall Guys Racing Stages and ‘Parkour Game’ is a much longer Platforming Parkour, which took most of its difficulty from the poor and imprecise movement controls in Super-B. Interestingly enough, I saw additional gamemodes and maps in the trailer of the game, which I never experienced ingame. Maybe they are supposed to be added in at a later stage, if the game even manages to exist for much longer.

Super-B was already dead on arrival. The game launched with an all-time Steam player peak of less than 50 and has only reached 10 simultaneous players on two days in the last 3 months. For a game with a focus on Online Multiplayer that’s beyond devastating. I have played all gamemodes in this game and I have never met another player. At least the lobbies fill up pretty quickly with Bots, which keeps Super-B playable.

But is that even worth it? The Gameplay in all gamemodes is not good. Movement and Gunplay feel stiff and unprecise, like the game wouldn’t even have proper analog movement. It made the platforming levels way more cumbersome than necessary, but shooter stages are not really better. I also experienced no difference when switching between Mouse and Keyboard and Controller. The gameplay isn’t broken, but it’s also not fun. There are hundreds of games out there, which do the same in better.

Outside of the regular gamemodes, you can also take a stroll through a hub world called Brick City. There is, however, nothing really to see or do there. Social features don’t work, if the playerbase of your game is nonexistent. You can also visit the homes of other players, but the housing feature is locked behind a monthly subscription. This game with a totally dead playerbase has 3 tiers of a monthly subscription for 5, 10 and 20 Euro/Dollar per month. That is absolutely insane. Who in their right mind would pay 20 bucks per month for an Online Multiplayer Game with no other players?

And there is, of course, also a Battle Pass for 15 Euro and a shop with a bunch of skins available for purchase. You can theoretically earn a bit of currency just by playing the game, but it’s a long grind and totally not worth it in a dead game.

Let’s also take a short moment to talk about the visuals of this game, which are really poor. You could easily call it terrible without lying. Even Roblox looks nearly good in comparison. The fact, that the developers, however, advertise this game on Steam as having “AAA Visuals”, is a contender for joke of the year. If those graphics are AAA, then I don’t want to ever see bad visuals, because they would probably make my eyes hurt.

The soundtrack however is actually not too bad. The variety is small, but the actual quality is decent. I did, however, experience some audio glitches with missing gunshots or strangely delayed sound effects.

Settings are furthermore for a professional game way too limited. You can barely customize anything. This seems more akin to something we would see on a mobile game.

Super-B also features 66 Steam Achievements, which initially seemed to be broken. I and some of the few other players fulfilled the requirements for a bunch of them without being able to unlock any of them. It turns out, the achievement descriptions are false and the actual achievements are much more grindy. The game can therefore not even be recommended for achievement hunters.

 

Result:

Who was this game made for? I am not sure that there actually is a target audience for Super-B out there. The gameplay and visuals make the game look like an inferior Roblox copy, but Super-B doesn’t actually allow players to create their own maps and gamemodes. You end up with dedicated gamemodes with homemade quality and a nonexistent playerbase. The game itself isn’t awful. Nothing is really broken, but Super-B also doesn’t even reach mediocrity and I struggle to find any actual reason to play it.

 

4/10

Fortnite - Arenas Boxfights (PS5) Review

 

Arenas Boxfights is the newest permanent Gamemode addition to Fortnite. This is an official Boxfight Gamemode by Epic, which offers 16 Players Solo and Duo matches, as well as 1v1 Duels. Players get put in multiple rounds into small arenas to fight one opponent or one enemy team per round. The first to reach 20 Wins in Solo or 15 in Duo will be declared Champions of the match.

Loadouts are randomized ahead of every match, but they are very similar. You always play with one AR, one SMG, one Shotgun and two health items. I barely noticed any differences between the different Loadouts. The variety seemed honestly quite small. What was apparent, however, was how overpowered Shotguns are in this mode in comparison to the other weapons. You can hit all your shots with an AR or SMG, but if your opponent gets one clean headshot in with the shotgun, then it’s all over. In a Battle Royale match this wouldn’t be much of a problem since there are different combat situations and distances that change things up.

In Arenas however there are only very small-scale maps. It’s interesting how the waiting area in these matches is a gladiatorial arena, which reminded me of the awesome Colossal Coliseum POI from Chapter 2 Season 5. The maps during the actual rounds, however, are small, ugly chambers, which are practically indistinguishable from each other. They try to up the presentation by offering small cutscenes ahead of and after the matches, but those are certainly not enough to convince Boxfight veterans to make the switch to the now official version.

What is really preventing the switch from regular Boxfight players to Arenas Boxfights, however, is the terrible technical status of the gamemode. The list of Bugs and Glitches is long and at launch the gamemode was practically unplayable and didn’t even start for most players. Epic fixed some of those issues, but you will still experience frequent Glitches in all matches. There are many visual errors, footsteps will be silent in half the matches, which in a gamemode like this is gamebreaking and at other times you will not get any opponents due to disconnects and be permanently stuck in the match.

The unofficial Boxfight Maps in Fortnite Creative are in much better shape and those were created by amateurs, while Arenas Boxfights is the work of professional developers. Until they fix those issues, there is little incentive for veterans to make the switch to the official version.

I am also surprised that Epic didn’t try to mix things up by, for example, offering a real BR Tournament for Boxfights. Every round one team or player could be eliminated and only the winner would progress to the next stage. This could have mixed classic Boxfights with a round based BR concept. Now Arenas Boxfights is practically identical to Creative Boxfights, but significantly worse and glitched.

I was furthermore shocked to read that Epic is apparently trying to reach a casual audience with this gamemode. Keep in mind that Arenas Boxfights is Ranked only and Build only, without Zero-Build or non-ranked options. This is the least casual combination imaginable. The only players this could appeal to are hardcore players, but Epic doesn’t believe they can attract those either and this was even before taking into account the many Glitches of this gamemode. It seems there is simply no real target audience for Arenas Boxfights.

There are currently also many disconnects going on in the gamemode, which makes the experience worse for everybody. 2v2s with random teammates are sometimes near unplayable, because teammates disconnect all the time, which makes the experience unbearable for their remaining partners. Casual players try it out and are shocked by what they see, so they leave, but that also makes the hardcore players who gave the gamemode a chance leave in turn as well. A sinister circle, but it’s really not looking good for Arenas Boxfights.

 

Result:

Arenas Boxfights is the official Epic version of Boxfights, who have been one of the most important parts of Fortnite Creative since 2019. In 2026, it, however, seems like it’s too little too late. The gamemode is apparently aimed at casual players, but only offers settings for hardcore players. The technical status in the launch period is outrageous and makes this a significantly worse option to play than the unofficial Boxfight modes.

You also have to keep in mind, that this is the first new permanent gamemode after Fortnite announced the shutdown of Ballistic and Rocket Racing. Perhaps not the best gamemodes in Fortnite, but they at least brought something unique to the table. Epic shutting them down to create this flawed experiment is certainly not a good look either.

In order to save Arenas Boxfights I would suggest offering Zero-Build and Non-Ranked versions, fixing the many glitches and offering better maps and more elements to differentiate itself from Creative. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be surprised if Arenas Boxfight doesn’t even last till 2027. It’s honestly shocking how Epic once again launches a new gamemode in such a rough state, that it will automatically leave a negative first impression with most players, severely limiting any potential of the mode.

 

4/10