Best Fiends Tips, Cheats and Strategies

Best Fiends is a match-3 adventure from Seriously with some lite RPG and monster-evolution mechanics. In this game, you’ll collect cute “fiends” that will battle invading slugs as you make matches and meet specific stage goals. Gamezebo’s Best Fiends Tips, Cheats and Strategies will help you slay slugs as efficiently as possible.

• • You can review damage before making a move: As you draw a line between tiles to make a match, the amount of damage that will be done to the slug appears over its head and is subtracted from its current HP. Use this key to check which move is best when trying to finish off a slug. In the image above, our currently selected move will do 600 damage out of the slug’s 1,000 total HP. A small sliver of orange health remains, indicating this move will not completely kill the slug.
  • Damage carries over to the next enemy: If you “overkill” a slug, any extra damage will apply to the next enemy that appears. This means that making large, damage-heavy chains is almost always beneficial since you won’t lose any of the attack value in the enemy transition. The exception to this rule are enemies that are vulnerable to certain elements: if you overkill a slug with purple mushrooms and the next enemy is immune to mushrooms, then no damage will be done to him. Note: “overkill”ing a slug will also usually reward bonus items, like meteor mites, so it has more than one advantage.
  • Many obstacles take more than one match to break: Although tree twigs will break after a single match, most hazards require you match multiple tiles nearby in order to remove them. This applies to snow, ooze-covered tiles, crates, etc. However, bombs will remove these obstacles in a single blow, even if you haven’t depleted them at all. This means a bomb will blow open a crate on the first try, even if it’s fully intact.

• • You keep all items collected during a stage, even if you lose: This includes diamonds, meteor mites, and keys. If you can tell you’re going to lose a stage, use your remaining moves to collect as many of these items as possible since you’ll still receive them at the end.

• • Check the goal on the map screen before starting and choose fiends accordingly: When you tap on a level on the map, its goals and your current party will pop up. In the image above, the goals are: 1) kill 8 slugs, 2) collect (break open) 2 crates, and 3) collect 40 purple mushroom tiles. If the stage requires a significant amount of a certain color, you’ll probably want a fiend whose ability is a Converter in that color. Or if you need to kill a large number of slugs, you’ll want fiends with Bombs, which do extra damage when detonated.
  • Pay attention to goals, but don’t let them distract you: Many goals will come naturally as you make matches. Don’t spend all your time collecting just mushrooms, for instance, even if they are part of the goal. Work the board, free up blockages, and just be aware of how the goals are progressing over time.
  • If you keep failing a level, pay attention to which goal you are failing: As an exception to the above rule, if you repeatedly fail a level because of a specific goal, focus on achieving the goal first. For instance, if you fail a level repeatedly because you’re not collecting enough blue water drops, try to collect blue water drops whenever they are available.
  • When slug-killing, focus on the fiends you have: Early in the game, you may only have one or two fiends in your party. Matches made with these fiends’ tiles—e.g., green leaves for Temper, yellow flowers for Kwincy, etc.—will do much more damage than matches made with tiles that have no related fiends because their damage will be multiplied by your fiends’ attack power. Once you have fiends assigned to every color, still be aware of attack power: the higher a fiends’ attack power, the more damage their matches will do.

• • A note on finding fiends: Although fiends’ appearance seems to be random, we didn’t find any extra fiends beyond Temper and Qwincy until entering the “Frozen Hills.” In fact, we had to buy extra keys and search for more fiends because this area requires at least three fiends to progress. At that point, we found three new fiends in a row. It seems like Frozen Hills / level 21 is the turning point for finding fiends and a good area to do extra rescues. If you don’t find any fiends before this gate, don’t worry about it too much.
  • You can’t leave the rescue screen until you’ve used your keys: You have to go through the rescue selection when you beat a level for the first time. However, if you earn bonus keys from replayed levels or from failed stages, these keys will be accumulated and available whenever you want to enter the rescue screen. If you want to save these up and use them all at once, do not enter the rescue screen, as you won’t be able to exit until you spend your keys.
  • Save diamonds for rescues: The most important part of rescues are collecting fiends, but their appearance is random and may require multiple attempts before you snag one. Saving your diamonds to buy extra keys will help you find fiends much faster. Once you have found most of the fiends—or at least one fiend per color—you can start using diamonds for upgrades more freely.
  • Think before you “replay” a level: When you lose a level and choose to replay from the failure screen, you don’t get a chance to change your party. If you’re having trouble with a level, sometimes swapping your fiends can make all the difference. Before you hit “replay,” stop to think if you need to regroup—if you do, return to the map and then select the level, then change your party.

• • You don’t have to open up every section of a cluttered level: Sometimes just breaking a few of the hazards can make a huge difference. Level 21 is a good example: it’s surrounded by ice walls, but you don’t have to break every wall to win the stage.
  • Bypass the energy meter: There’s currently no way to buy out the energy meter, and it recharges extremely slowly. You can bypass the timer by changing the clock on your device. Exit the game completely (double-tap home and swipe up on the game’s image to exit). Go to your device settings > general > date and time. Set the clock ahead 3 hours, then open the game again. The energy should be refilled and you can now set your time back to normal in settings. Note: the first time we tried this, it didn’t work. We had to exit the app and redo the steps, and it worked on the second try and every time thereafter.
  • Other notes on energy: If you don’t want to change your clock, you can occasionally find increases to the max energy during rescues. These are permanent and will remain with you forever. There are also sometimes instant energy refills, although usually only a couple of jolts at a time (the max we’ve found is six jolts).

• • Most of the time, you should choose fiends with the Bomb ability: Bomb fiends are more useful since they have higher attack levels and their Bombs can help complete other goals, like opening crates and collecting diamonds. Only choose fiends with the Converter ability if you need a really high number of colored tiles, like 50+. You can review fiends’ abilities by clicking the “i” for info on the fiends menu.
  • Certain levels are better for grinding than others: If you need to replay past levels to earn more mites and diamonds, you should select stages that include these items in their goals. This guarantees that the stage will feature that items you’re grinding for. A good level to grind is stage 30: its goals includes mite crates and diamonds, so you know you’ll find plenty of each there.

• Bomb abilities can be detonated from any part of a chain: When you set off a Bomb tile, the last tile in the chain will be where the bomb is detonated. This means you can control where a Bomb goes off by making your chain longer or shorter. The areas that will be detonated by a Bomb are highlighted with white dotted circles as you drag your finger across the board. The images above show the exact same bomb chain, but with the bomb about to be detonated in two different locations depending on where we choose to end the chain. This also results in different amounts of damage since the bomb would blow up different adjacent tiles depending on its location.
• Giant bombs can only be detonated by other bombs: Sometimes you’ll see a large black bomb stuck on a stage. These bombs will only blow up if you use a fiend’s Bomb ability near them. The giant bomb has to be included in the radius of the fiend’s bomb, and blowing it up will destroy every tile on the board.
• Converters change tiles to their color permanently: If you tap on a Converter, you can see which tiles will be changed to its color. These are always adjacent to the Converter, so you’ll often match them in the same chain. However, if a wall is in the way or you choose to not collect every converted tile, they will remain changed even after the Converter is gone. Keep this in mind when using Converters since it can sometimes break chains of other colors nearby.

Jillian Werner

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Jillian will play any game with cute characters or an isometric perspective, but her favorites are Fallout 3, Secret of Mana, and Harvest Moon. Her PC suffers from permanent cat-on-keyboard syndrome, which she blames for most deaths in Don’t Starve. She occasionally stops gaming long enough to eat waffles and rewatch Battlestar Galactica.