Holy Hand Grenades!
I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the final release and this game is pure creepy frantic clicking skull smashing Hell (in a good way)! Besides the death metal riffs and clearly demonic artwork, there is even some really sick text scrolling by in the upper right (hard to read it while playing, but from what little I've seen, it ain't happy stuff).
There is just the one game type but with 3 difficulty levels which I can only assume indicate the rate at which the baddies spawn.
The core gameplay mechanic has been done a million times before. Tap any skull in the fray and as long as there are at least three same type skulls in that cluster, they'll blowup for some points. As the screen fills with more and more skulls your health (a big vial of blood in the lower left corner) will drain away, faster the more skulls that are on the screen. Simple stuff...but that is only the beginning!
Everytime you clear a cluster of skulls, a skull of that same type somewhere else in the playfield will start glowing (sympathy pains?). If you manage to tap a cluster with 3 of these glowing skulls you'll increase the game's multiplier (I think this goes down slowly over time or completely resets on your death).
Sometimes when clearing a big cluster a blood bat will spawn and start flying about. If you manage to tap this wily flying rat before it flies off screen you can earn yourself some extra points and a little extra blood back in your vial. The catch here being that in trying to tap the bat, you could easily miss by a hair and clear some cluster you've been trying to setup (either to get the 3 glowing bits or simply to make one huge scoring cluster).
Occasionally a BIG skull with a red circle around him (indicates his current health) will join the fray. These guys don't match with the little skulls so the only way to kill them is blow up a bunch of adjacent little guys or blasting him with one of the game's weapons.
Weapons!? You bet. Various grenades will work their way into the fray of skulls that you simply tap to set off (some might require an additional tap to indicate their target).
Lastly, you have the ability, although fairly limited, to pick off individual skulls if they get in your way. Just double tap on a skull and it will disappear at the cost of some blue mana (indicated right there by your health vial). Continued normal tapping of skull clusters will slowly refill the meter if you ever run out.
5/5