Well - there's a tutorial you can go through. Indeed just like the Eurogamer review states this is a game that you fire up, go like "WTF?" and realize that you really DO need the tutorial. ;-)
All in all it's not that complicated (the basics are easy but intricacies are numerous) and pretty innovative, I'd say, since it's a puzzle-strategy hybrid with some simultaneous gameplay elements and phases that are almost mini-games all by themselves.
The goal is to capture the enemy princess from her castle and bring them to yours. Each turn is divided into three phases:
1. Dropping Tetris-like blocks to form paths (you move farther on your own blocks and are also stronger when attacking/defending; this happens simultaneously so players can cancel out each other's moves).
2. Moving your hero (and picking up items on the way).
3. Shooting your cannons - you get two shots with which you can destroy items or non-combo (less than 5 in a line) blocks but if two or more shots collide they cancel each other out so you can also protect vital items from enemy fire by firing two-shot volleys on a single location yourself or predicting where the enemy will shoot and only fire once.
The rest is just managing your hero's special abilities and item pickups - with proper planning you can build awesome combo chains but you have very limited time for decision making...
There is a great deal of depth in the game because of some fine details but the longer a particular game goes on, the greater the chance that somebody will win by sheer luck because the right item spawns in the right moment. E.g. in the following replay:
http://resetgeneration-site.arena.n-gag ... 1-1F5CFD50 I won only because of a conveniently placed bomb that allowed me to finish off green (killing another hero immediately teleports the princess to your location) even though he was controlling the situation most of the time (my move into his castle was crucial since it blocked his capture route - I barely made it by boosting my movement).
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.... pass
Using Google Chrome? Surely you have IE on your computer as well (after the fact that it can't be fully uninstalled was the source of several lawsuits ;-)... Or Firefox, which is also supported...