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Castaway Home Designer: You are the mayor of a tropical island and also the interior designer for each of the citizens. You earn gems by creating unique and stylish interiors. There are over 1,000 pieces of furniture to use. The game is ad-driven so you have to let a few videos run to earn the furniture. Then you can decorate the little houses. You can earn even more gems by listening to the likes and dislikes of citizens.

Price: Free, with in-app purchases

Design Home: Every day brings up to six fresh design challenges, and each has a prompt: design a Renaissance-style living room for this picture-perfect Paris mansion. Style a industrial bedroom for this sleek, million-dollar house in Belarus. The more you play, the more goods you acquire — paintings, wall clocks, vases, ferns and other accents for your inventory. More choice means better-designed rooms, and a greater chance your fellow players will give your eclectic Florence patio a score of four stars or more. That nets you a piece of furniture as a prize. Five stars and you get the prize plus a bunch of diamonds.

Price: Free, with in-app purchases

Designing your home has always been an exciting, if exhausting, activity. The indecision over which colour to use for the walls, the dithering over whether you want plain or printed curtains, the satisfaction when a room comes together. Home Design Makeover, as the name suggests, is a game that brings this feeling to your mobile, albeit with a little twist.

You are a home decorator and your job is to redesign rooms for lucky families. The twist here is that you do this by playing match three levels. The puzzles get you coins that you can spend on different decorations. It takes a while to finish a house but it is a very satisfying experience.

Overall, the graphics are good and the players get a real sense of designing a home. All the furniture, colours and decor items look like they have been chosen carefully by someone who has good taste. For every item that you place, you are provided multiple options that give you the choice to design the room according to your taste. That makes this game even more compelling. Apart from the variety within a stage, there is variety between stages as well as you get to renovate family-friendly rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms.

The other important part of the game, that is the match three, is simple in its execution and tries some unique ideas. You can buy boosters with gems so that levels become easier to play. The difficulty does spike at certain points and makes the game frustrating to play. But the variation in levels and the overall target of finishing the level keeps you going.

VERDICT: Home Design Makeover is a fun game to play for those interested in renovation and redecoration. Its colourful graphics and story keep you hooked. However, the match three levels can get a little difficult to finish and that can increase the overall frustration of the game. For those who are bored of the usual match three levels and want some innovation, this is the game for you. I would rate it seven out of 10.

Castaway Home Designer File picture

Game: Home Design Makeover by Storm8 Studios

Genre: Puzzle

Platforms: Android and iOS