REVIEW: Gummy Drop!


Title	Gummy Drop!
Developer	Big Fish Games
Publisher	Big Fish Games
Release Date	December 18, 2014
Genre	Match-3
Platform	All Mobile Platforms
Age Rating	Everyone
Official Website

I’ve stated before that it’s pretty rare for me to play mobile games, and there’s a couple of reasons for that. As a general rule, I don’t like micro transactions, and I tend to prefer playing my 3DS. It’s portable and runs off a separate battery than the phone I use for everything else all the time. While I can easily sink hours into my 3DS, mobile games are built to be played in small bursts (or toilet breaks). That being said, I had a surprising amount of fun with this matching game from Big Fish Games.

Gummy Drop is a game about matching gummies and using the resources and money you get from winning to build up big cities around the world. There are fun mechanics introduced, like the ability to shovel out one gummy that is giving you a hard time, or the ability to completely get rid of one type of gummy that is on the visible board, making it easy to create big combos and get higher scores. Predictably, you’re given the first couple free, then have to buy more with actual currency. Each level gives you 10 coins while the cheapest upgrade is well over 200. You can play a level over, however, up to three times and get more coins, but the difficulty goes up each time by quite a bit, and you only get three lives. Lives seem to respawn every 15 minutes, so, if you don’t mind waiting an hour an a half, you can do so, or just buy more using real money.

Nothing about the music stood out to me, but I did mute it since I played it mostly at work in 10-15 minute bursts. One thing I liked was how easy it was to pick up and put down in the middle of a game. I didn’t have to worry about a timer or losing the match if I got distracted midway through.

The game is simple and easy to pick up, but there isn’t anything about it that really makes it stand out, either. You only get three lives — usually not a lot, since you can quickly burn through those lives on one level in less than five minutes. There is an interesting feature where you build up buildings in whatever country you’re playing in (you start in Australia). You collect bricks and other things in the match-3 puzzles before using them to build landmarks and advance the game. As you can imagine, it’s quite easy to give in and use real money to try and get around these hiccups. Now that this game is on my phone, I won’t be deleting it, but I probably won’t be going out of my way to boot it up and play it, either. There isn’t much about this game that pushes it out of the pack of many, many, many match-3 candy games in the mobile market.

It feels very cookie-cutter in its approach to getting you to have fun. It’s a gray suit in a large crowd of gray suits, but it does have nice cufflinks. If you have binoculars, you might spot the shiny cufflinks. You might be quite chuffed and satisfied by the snazzy cufflinks on a drab gray suit. But, for people without such fancy tools, it’s just another gray suit.