Jelly Glutton review

Jelly Glutton is a Facebook game from Royal Cactus. It's available now for anyone to play on the social network, and is currently showing up in the Trending section of the Games category on App Center. Jelly Glutton is a match-3 puzzle game that takes very strong cues from King's immensely popular Candy Crush Saga. In other words, it takes a linear level-based structure with a variety of different objectives to complete, ranging from attaining a specific score in a set number of moves to clearing all of the "jelly" from a stage by making matches atop it. As the player progresses through the levels, they proceed through a number of different visual themes, all of which are food-based. This gives a degree of variety to the game's aesthetic, if not the gameplay. Basic gameplay in Jelly Glutton is as you would expect from the genre; swapping objects is achieved by either clicking on two adjacent objects or dragging one onto another. Matching three or more objects in a horizontal or vertical line causes them to disappear; matching four or more summons one of several different types of powerup depending on how many objects were in the match, and incorporating these powerups into another match sets them off, with varying effects that tend to clear large proportions of the board. As the player reaches higher levels in the game, various purchasable powerups become available. "Equipment" powerups are consumable and may be purchased with soft currency earned through play (at an extremely slow rate, it must be said), while "booster" powerups provide a permanent bonus in exchange for real money. The cheapest of these boosters is $4.50, which seems rather expensive -- but given that King's Candy Crush Saga features powerups that cost $16.99, $24.99 and $39.99, $4.50 starts to look a little more reasonable. It's still expensive for what it is, though -- particularly when you consider that it's possible to purchase a standalone copy of Bejeweled with no additional in-app purchases for $0.99 on mobile phones. Jelly Glutton is a perfectly competent puzzle game, but once again it's another example of rather lazy game design. The puzzle game genre on home computers and consoles is a diverse one that is far more broad and interesting than social games' over-reliance on Bejeweled's (or, more accurately, Shariki's) mechanics suggests, and seeing the same game mechanics endlessly rehashed in a series of almost-identical games is surely not a sustainable model in the long term. There are far too many gem-swapping match-3 games on Facebook already, and Jelly Glutton is just crowding the market ever further without adding anything particularly meaningful or interesting to the mix. Thus, despite the fact that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the game itself, it's tough to recommend it in good conscience -- particularly while other titles in this genre such as King's Candy Crush Saga are dominating the market so comprehensively. It's time we saw some new mechanics in social puzzle games; sadly, Jelly Glutton is not the game that provides such innovation. Jelly Glutton currently occupies the 500,000+ MAU tier with a rank of 605, and the 50,000+ DAU tier with a rank of 570. Follow its progress with AppData, our tracking service for social games and developers. Skip Another formulaic match-3 game that adds little of note to the mix.

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Jelly Glutton review

Pete Davison

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Pete Davison