When it comes to the casual free-to-play match-3 puzzle genre, evolution tends to win out over revolution. An army of game designers have devoted their lives to perfecting the art of the match-3 puzzler, and there’s just not that much room for improvement.
But every so often a game comes along that quietly moves things forward.
Launched in 2022, Triple Match 3D is – in many ways – nothing you haven’t seen before. It’s powered by the same free-to-play loop that has been behind countless Candy Crush Saga descendants over the last two decades.
But developer Boombox Games have worked hard with the intention of designing a gameplay mechanic that’s pretty much new – or at least a mashup of gameplay mechanics that we don’t recall playing before.
Inspirational Puzzler
Arguably it inspired many titles that have come after it, such as Peak’s Match Factory which was released 18 months later. Yet according to SensorTower Triple Match 3D has had 20 million downloads across both iOS and Android since its launch in early 2022 – showing it’s a game that’s here to stay and then some, with Triple Match perhaps even starting a whole new sub-genre.
Here’s that SensorTower info mentioned above…
We’ll begin with how the game works though. Your goal in Triple Match 3D is to match items and make them disappear, with the occasional assistance of a range of power-ups and boosts. These are consumable, and you buy them with coins that you earn by completing levels, claiming daily rewards, and so on. Or you can just pay for them with your own money.
There are several different events, such as Kyoto Zen Oasis that sees you fitting out a zen garden – as well as another that involves working your way down a zigzag lane liberating a small town from the fog of war.
Plus there are tournaments to join, and a team feature that sees you joining a team to chat, donate lives, and ask for lives when you’re running low.
Juice Bar, meanwhile, sees you blending the fruit you’ve collected in stages to fulfil customer orders and earn coins. Like the Star Chest, Level Chest, and Daily Gift features, this is a way for you to earn extra goodies on a daily basis.
Yep. With a few little tweaks, this could be a description of half the mobile games you’ve played in your life.
Fortunately, it’s in the all-important gameplay department that Triple Match 3D takes a welcome left turn. Instead of giving you a nice, symmetrical grid of colorful objects to tap and slide together, this game presents you with a haphazard heap of random stuff.
How does it work?
The playing area is a pile of things, and beneath it sits a bar made up of seven blank spaces. When you tap on an object, it gets transferred from the heap into one of these spaces, and if three matching objects appear in the bar they vanish.
If, on the other hand, you fill up the bar with non-matching objects, it’s Game Over. Plus there’s time pressure, so moving too slowly is another route to failure.
On the face of it, this is a pretty straightforward task. All you need to do is tap on three things that look the same. But the difficulty quickly ramps up as the screen fills with objects that obscure one another and look confoundingly similar in color or shape (e.g., cylindrical white mugs and cylindrical rolls of white toilet paper).
And because everything is in three dimensions (the clue is in the name) it’s often quite difficult to establish that two identical items are actually the same, simply because of the angle they’re resting at.
It turns out that seven is a very stingy number of empty slots to sort your potential matches into, and three minutes is a very stingy time limit to complete the task in.
Thankfully, Triple Match 3D throws you a bone or two. Not only can you ask your teammates to donate extra lives, but you can extend your runs with coins. Meanwhile, consumable boosts and power-ups let you freeze or extend your time, randomly remove objects, shuffle the board, remove objects from the bar, and more.
Triple Match 3D can be cognitively demanding too, requiring you to identify and then match 3D objects from a range of shifting angles – offering a greater visual-processing challenge than your average Match 3 game.
Thankfully, it’s also at the more innovative end of the spectrum, combining elements of Mahjong, Freecell, and even Fruit Ninja in a fun new way.
Final Verdict?
If you’re a fan of casual free-to-play puzzlers on mobile – or at least open to becoming hooked on one again – you could do a lot worse than Triple Match 3D. There’s a range of themed events for the game to keep you engaged all year round too, such as ones tied into Earth Week or Saving the Reindeer on Christmas.
You can find it on the App Store and Google Play, and the game’s official site is here.
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