Game Reviews

Triple Town

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Triple Town
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| Triple Town

I know what you're thinking. You're looking at screenshots of Triple Town, pulling a face, and saying to yourself, "This looks like every other match-three game I've never played".

It's true that Triple Town doesn't exactly look like the most enthralling experience you could have - but you'd be crackers to pass it by without at least a quick go.

That said, it's impossible to have a "quick go" of Triple Town. Hours after booting it up you'll be cursing bears and having dreams of floating, light-filled castles.

Give me a triple

Presented with a 6x6 grid in the middle of a forest, you're supplied with grass, bushes, trees, and other assorted items to place in the grid.

Put three bits of grass next to each other and they'll turn into a bush. Three bushes become a tree, three trees become a hut, and so on. For the most part, you'll be getting grass every go, but every so often you'll be thrown an item that's higher up the food chain.

This may all sound simple enough, but it require serious tactical nous. The last item you put down in a group of three is where the next item up will appear. So if you need, say, a bush in a specific place then you're going to need to put the third grass in that position.

Now imagine that you need a tree in a specific place - this involves working backwards to determine where you'll need your bushes, then working out where the grass for each bush will go. Now go further and imagine the work that goes into making a hut, or a house, or a mansion.

Triple Town is no walk in the park. Like getting the special gems in Bejeweled, managing to acquire some of the higher-up buildings in Triple Town is hugely exciting.

Go to town on it

All this, and we haven't even discussed what really makes Triple Town tick - those damn bears.

Bears appear as placeable items every now and again, and once plopped down in your town they'll walk around each time you place something else down, and use up valuable space.

Get three bears trapped together and they'll turn into a church. Get three churches together and they turn into a cathedral. You can see where this is going.

Then you have ninja bears, which jump around the town and can only be killed by using special robots. And there are the diamonds that act as wild cards and can match anything, as well as going to create mountains that hold gold, which you can use to buy items that get you out of sticky situations.

Triple Town is far from your average match-three game. It's incredibly easy to get completely lost in a round and accidentally, say, forget to write a review for the game because you were so enthralled.

Trip and fall

Triple Town is free-to-play, but comes with some in-app purchases that can help you score more points and climb those online leaderboards.

Fortunately, none of these is essential. It's a little annoying that you run out of moves and have to wait an hour or two before you can proceed, though you may be grateful for the artificial restraint on your playing time.

Our only real gripe is that Triple Town is currently quite thin on content. Other than this main game mode, there's nothing else to see or do. However, future game modes are promised, and are apparently coming very soon.

All this amounts to one of the best takes on the match-three genre that we've seen in a good while.

Triple Town

Love life, hate bears. Triple Town breathes fresh life into the match-three genre, and makes letting go of your smartphone rather difficult
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Mike Rose
Mike Rose
An expert in the indie games scene, Mike comes to Pocket Gamer as our handheld gaming correspondent. He is the author of 250 Indie Games You Must Play.