Being in love sucks! If it isn't the pain of your heart being stepped on and squashed like a bug, it's having to overcome numerous obstacles – such as an overbearing father – in order to just be near the one you want. So, should you find yourself having to embark on a journey to get a magical stone to prove your worth to your love, what should you do? As it turns out, having a magical bow that shoots different colored balls is a marvelous tool to have to save the day.

DragonStone revolves around Baldric the Knight, a good-hearted…well…knight who is deeply in love with the princess of the kingdom. The king, however, is weary of the man or either simply too protective of his child. Seeing a chance to get rid of the knight, he tasks Baldric with finding the DragonStone, a stone that may or may not be a myth and nothing more than a fake journey meant to lose the knight to the monsters of the world. Finding the DragonStone is the chance to prove your love, however, so you decide to adventure out and find the stone. The story of DragonStone is nice and actually kind of funny at times, but it's far removed from the game, only showing up at random times to shed a little light on some new event or gameplay obstacles getting ready to cross your path. It's a shame too since the writing could've easily sustained itself throughout the course of the game by being used more often.

The gameplay is unlike any casual games I've every played, leaning more towards a Bust-a-Move or Luxor game style if it had to fit into any subgenre. You play through the game as Baldric, represented in battle by a floating magical bow. You'll use your bow to scroll left and right from the top of the screen, looking downwards to see what colored orbs are coming up next. In order to advance through the level, going further and further down until you reach the finish line, you have to eliminate all the orbs in one section in order to make the ground fall away and present to you the next mini-puzzle area. The colored orbs will disappear whenever a group of three of them are connected at once, but there are also locked orbs that will only open up once another three or more combo has been made that touches it.

Besides using left mouse button clicks to shoot the colored orbs at the bottom of the screen, you're also able to shoot onscreen enemies by clicking the right button to blast an arrow their way. Creatures like spiders, bees, and man-eating plants will all do damage to you if they hit your bow. It's easy enough to clear the enemies out, as we didn't struggle much in terms of dealing with the difficulty (or lack thereof) in the game. Besides shooting arrows to destroy monsters, you'll also use arrows to shoot at targets on the level, which when removed with often times let you complete the level quicker in a cascading combo of colored orbs. Some puzzles are also impossible as they currently are, such as having a tiny-stacked mound of orbs that you can't make combos with since the orbs will roll off the side and fall down. In cases like that you can charge up your bow by holding the right mouse button in and then releasing in order to destroy that area and make the level suddenly winnable. Another environmental obstacle to help you out is powder kegs that you can drop an orb on to make it explode and eliminate pieces in that area.

As you advance on your journey, you'll be able to use the gold you've managed to collect in order to upgrade various abilities to help you survive longer. As we mentioned, however, surviving wasn't that much of a problem since we were quick enough on the draw to destroy enemies before they hit us, and we never ran across the issue of the board pieces getting too close to the top and making us lose.

Outside of the fresh gameplay perspective, the game has a great charm that comes through loud and clear thanks to the excellent cartoon styled characters, scrolling background images of various depths, and in the end everything just really looks amazing. The sound work was quite nice as well, featuring a soothing mythical song that played in the background, while the arrow and orb popping and rolling effects sounded good too.

DragonStone easily gets one of my best recommendations in a while. It's a great casual game that manages to take one type of gameplay, turn it on its head, and then create an amazingly simple to understand game that will have you shooting orbs for quite a few hours. Will Baldric be able to save the day? Hopefully you'll enlist to give the game a shot and help him out.

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