Spring Bonus is a match-3 puzzle game that sees you helping the Easter Bunny melt away the cold snow and ice of winter to usher in Spring and a magic rainbow. Through 100 levels, you’ll come across a large selection of items to match, and an even larger variety of board shapes on which you’ll do it. For those looking for a straight-forward puzzle game without any frills, this is a nice place to look, but those wanting a bit more depth might be disappointed.
Spring Bonus is a match-3 puzzle game that sees you helping the Easter Bunny melt away the cold snow and ice of winter to usher in Spring and a magic rainbow. Through 100 levels, you’ll come across a large selection of items to match, and an even larger variety of board shapes on which you’ll do it. For those looking for a straight-forward puzzle game without any frills, this is a nice place to look, but those wanting a bit more depth might be disappointed.
For starters, there is no real story to speak of in Spring Bonus. You’ll be able to put two-and-two together as you play through the game that Spring is coming and you need to break away the last ice-blocks of winter, but other than that, your interaction with all of the game’s advertised critters (lambs, rabbits, and chicks) will be almost entirely visual. The game contains a series of desktop backgrounds that you can download for use outside of the game, with these images serving as the backdrop for each of the game’s levels.
On the puzzle board itself, you’ll be tasked with clearing matches of three or more like objects, ranging from white rabbits and red ribbons to a handful of different Easter egg patterns. The goal of each level varies slightly, with some levels simply asking you to match a specific number of a single shape, while others are more complex, asking you to move golden eggs to the bottom of the gameplay board to remove them.
Other standard match-three elements are found here as well. While the game board itself is yellow, some objects will sit atop blue pieces of ice, while others will be encased entirely. In these cases, you’ll need to make matches on top of the ice, or using the piece that is trapped within to break the ice, revealing the yellow square underneath so you can move on.
There are a few power-ups to unlock by making matches of four or more pieces at once, like bubbles or sunshine pieces that clear square sections of the board, or birds and storm clouds that clear entire vertical or horizontal sections.
While none of this is extraordinary, you can make the game have a bit more proverbial flavor by upping the difficulty from the relaxed mode to the timed mode before you start each level. You’ll then be forced to complete a level before the timer runs out, and will gain bonus points for all of the time you have remaining. It’s unfortunate that these points (whether in relaxed or timed mode) really have no meaning, other than your own personal bragging rights, as there is nothing to do in between levels that incorporate them.
It’s in this that the game meets its biggest flaw. While the gameplay is solid match-three fare, and does contain a very cute graphical theme, the entire experience really seems to be missing something. Those with lots of experience in the genre can finish the vast portion of levels in under 60 seconds each, and while later levels do become larger and therefore take longer to complete, the entire experience suffers from its repetition due to there being nothing else to experience to break up the possible monotony.
Even something as small as dialogue could have increased the enjoyment potential here tenfold, but as it stands, Spring Bonus is unfortunately one of those games that’s best played in short sessions to retain the fun factor, even if Easter is your favorite holiday.
