Casual puzzlers are among the most popular genres of mobile games, and match-three puzzlers are among the most popular kinds of puzzlers.
We get it. Candy Crush is amazing, and so are many of the games that followed in its wake, reproducing the gameplay, the power-ups, the boosts, the aesthetics, and, well… basically just copying Candy Crush.
But innovation matters too. Download Tile Family Adventure – published by Catbyte and backed by LOUD Ventures – for free and you’ll find a casual puzzler that dares to be different, doubling down on accessibility and challenge while offering a type of gameplay that you’ll rarely, if ever, have encountered before.
Here’s how it works.
You’re presented with an arrangement of tiles, many of them overlapping. On these tiles are a vast range of colorful, cartoony images, such as candies, cookies, apples, maps, donuts, shovels, spades, four-leafed clovers, purple stars, and more.
Along the bottom of the screen, meanwhile, there’s a rack of spaces for seven tiles. The object of the game is to tap on tiles from the stack to place them in these spaces. If three matching tiles end up in the rack, they disappear—even if they’re not touching.
To win a stage, you need to clear the entire screen. If you end up with too many non-matching tiles in the rack—and therefore too few spaces to accommodate three of a kind, you lose.
And that’s it. Sounds simple, right?
It is. As game mechanics go, Tile Family Adventure is as straightforward as they come. But here’s the rub: it’s also incredibly easy to go wrong if you’re not paying attention.
That’s because it’s not possible to play a tile that’s partially covered by another tile. Before you attempt to match three of a kind, you need to be sure that you’ve got enough moves ahead of you to expose all of the tiles you need. It’s harrowingly easy to get this wrong.
To make matters worse, the game gradually introduces special tiles, such as surprise blocks, sticky blocks, and frozen blocks, all of which contrive to stymie you in different ways.
Fortunately, you go in armed with consumable power-ups in the form of a clue, a shuffle, and an undo. Any one of these can get you out of a hole, though you’ll want to use them sparingly or risk running out.
Tile Family Adventure is a free-to-play game, which means you have to earn your power-ups or pay for them.
If you like, you can hurry things along or extend your runs by watching videos, but that’s totally at your discretion. This isn’t one of those games that jams ads and IAPs down your throat.
So when you download Tile Family Adventure you’ll find it to be unique among casual puzzlers in terms of gameplay, but it’s got a couple of other major things going for it too.
For one thing, it looks and sounds fantastic, with plenty of soothingly drawn environments to explore, charming 3D tile designs, a pleasantly bouncy soundtrack, and cheerfully moreish sound effects.
There’s plenty of it, too. At the time of writing Tile Family Adventure boasts hundreds of levels, and new ones are being added all the time in updates. This is the sort of game that doesn’t end unless you want it to.
The casual puzzler genre is extremely crowded on mobile, and it takes a lot to stand out .For our money, Tile Family Adventure manages to outshine most of the competition in terms of novelty alone.
Make sure you download and play Tile Family Adventure for free right now.
