Jolly Jam (iOS) Review

Released under the Rovio Stars line of smaller games developed by independent teams, Jolly Jam's influences are shamelessly clear. It's an incredibly simple free-to-play app that sees players manipulating a grid of food in order to clear as many tiles as possible, and almost everything seems to have been lifted directly from King's chart-topper - while the candy may have been swapped out for similarly-coloured fruit, it's difficult to tell the difference otherwise. The power-ups are almost exactly the same, the deep-voiced narrator returns to bellow the same old egregious puns after a good combo (juicy!), and even the world map bears more than a striking resemblance to Candy Crush Saga.

That's not to say that Jolly Jam is completely barren of new ideas. Its core mechanic strays from the match-three gameplay for which Candy Crush is known and instead tasks players with drawing boxes filled with large amounts of the same fruit. It may be different, but it offers very little challenge for a significant amount of time; it takes a while for the game to throw in new mechanics such as locked fruit that can't be boxed and little monsters that threaten to munch through the entire grid if they aren't caught. There are even battles against a boss (inventively named Bos) sprinkled among the stages, although these don't spruce up the gameplay much more than adding a few extra monsters or a constant stream of locked fruit.

Jolly Jam's biggest problem, and one it's eager to borrow from Candy Crush, is its constant hunger for money. It's a surprisingly easy game and, unlike other free-to-play games like Pokémon Shuffle, only docks lives after a stage is failed, but it's constantly employing other tactics such as diamonds, a premium currency that is bought in exchange for real cash (but appears to do next to nothing, aside from granting extra chances at a free daily roulette, which yields a couple of power-ups) and constant requests to share the game on Facebook and to rate the it on the App Store, which easily become tiresome.

There's very little to say about Jolly Jam because it does so little that's fresh on this platform - this is Candy Crush Saga with a marginally altered coat of paint and different (but equally vapid) gameplay that gets boring long before it gets challenging. That the publisher of unique and interesting games such as Amazing Alex and RETRY should sink to such levels is incredibly disappointing.