Game: Juice Cubes

The new trend in match-three games is to draw lines through matching icons rather than shifting their positions. This interesting evolution not only gives players a new way to enjoy matching three, but it challenges them to solve similar issues by distinctly different means. Pocket Playlab's free-to-play Juice Cubes embraces the trend in hopes of attracting some of the Candy Crush Saga crowd; unfortunately, it fails to convince us that fruit is better for you than candy.Juice Cubes (which I keep wanting to call "Juicy Fruit") is born of a collaboration between Rovio Stars, the publishing arm of Rovio Entertainment (known for the Angry Birds franchise) and Pocket Playlab, the makers of another cube-themed game, Lost Cubes. (Fans of Lost Cubes, be warned—Juice Cubes' gameplay is completely different.) It's set among a series of small islands inhabited by things like sentient hermit crabs, pirates, and giant octopi, and these nautical natives all have one thing in common—they have problems. In their fancifully fluid world, those problems are solved by clearing levels using an easy-to-learn match-three technique, and who better to do that than you?"As mentioned before, Juice Cubes employs a match-three method wherein you connect static icons by drawing lines through them. The nine-by-nine board is covered with apples, strawberries, bananas, and coconuts and these can be connected vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. As "match-three" implies, matches require three or more of the same icon; matched icons burst, allowing the remaining ones to cascade toward the bottom of the screen. Unlike other games in the genre, in Juice Cubes there's no such thing as automatic matching, so cascades do nothing but rearrange the board. This makes for slightly different gameplay, but also eliminates the possibility of achieving the explosive random combo-chains achievable in games like Bejeweled and Candy Crush.