Square Enix has soft-launched… a Triple Town clone?

Whether you file this one under “weird news” or “shockingly late to the party,” I find myself positively stumped by Square Enix’s latest release. Farms & Castles has soft-launched in select regions on both Google Play and the App Store, and is a fairly clear case of one developer borrowing liberally from another’s winning formula.

But unlike most games that could be described as such, it would be hard to call Farms & Castles a “fast-follow” release — the game it draws inspiration from is SpryFox’s nearly four-year-old Triple Town.

Like Triple Town, Farms & Castles has players placing rocks and trees on a 6×6 grid in an attempt to position three like-objects together. When this happens, these objects merge and evolve into a new item. Match three of those new items and you’ll evolve again (and so on). The only major differences we’ve noticed so far are the inclusion of a two-currency system (powered by the farms and castles you’ll build), and a distinct lack of bears or any other real threat — at least as far as we’ve seen up to this point.

If you were to ask me to create a shortlist of mobile publishers that have blown me out of the water this year, Square Enix would be near the top. Maybe that’s why I was so surprised to see such a standard mobile industry move come from a publisher whose plans thus far have been anything but the norm. Their casual studio Hapti.co (Smoothie Swipe) is responsible for this one, which makes sense — but even still, drawing influence from the now four-year-old Triple Town seems like a strangely generic choice to make.

Farms & Castles isn’t a bad Triple Town copycat by any stretch, but there’s no denying what this is. If you want to give Square Enix your mobile attention, we’d have a hard time recommending this over recent gems like Hitman Sniper, Heavenstrike Rivals and Chaos Rings III.

And if you’d rather fill that SpryFox-shaped hole in your heart? There’s always Alphabear.

Jim Squires

• 

Jim Squires is the Editor-in-Chief of Gamezebo. Everything you see passes his eyes first, so we like to think of him as "the gatekeeper of cool stuff." He likes good games, great writing, and just can't say no to a hamburger. Also, he is not a bear.