Rainbow Rush Facebook Game Review

The action-packed puzzle stages run with little anecdotes between to give Rainbow Rush an apparent overarching storyline – though no one ever pays attention to these plots.

Essentially, someone has turned the plush and unicorn-filled kingdom into an ugly mess, and by winning all of these puzzles, you can change it back. Simple enough.

The game also starts out simple enough, with plain rectangular gameplay fields filled with red, yellow, green, blue and violet gems. Matching groups of more than two gems eliminates them and fills their space with the gems from above. The more gems you clear, the closer you get to a “star” rating. You need at least one star to win each level, and can gain three stars at most. The more stars you gain, the more coins you achieve for your win – $50 per star on a level you have never beaten before, or $25 per star on a level you have already beaten (unless, perchance, you have beaten the level before but only received a one-star rating – beating it again with three stars would still earn you $150).

There are a number of power-ups you can apply to the game, all of which are available immediately when you begin playing the game, unlike other game formats where the power-ups come to you gradually as you conquer each level. Of course, each power-up costs money (hint: almost every power-up costs more by itself than what you win for beating a level).

This is one of the many downfalls of the game.

The other downfall is the unnecessary and tiresome storyline which runs throughout the game – though at least there’s the option of skipping past them. Rainbow Rush isn’t awful, but with so many other games with similar formats out there, it’s not hard to find a more entertaining game with fewer pitfalls.

While some match-three games have a limited number of moves you can make and ask you to clear the board, Rainbow Rush is a timed game instead – the point is to make as many combinations as possible in as little time as possible.

That gets harder and harder as the game goes on, because the boards will shift shapes – starting as just rectangular boards and then moving to irregularly-shaped boards such as cross-shaped or with crooked edges. These irregular shapes don’t affect gameplay tremendously, but they can certainly cause you to take some time to get used to – and time is of the essence.

While strategic combo creation is obviously a plus (you’ll be hard-pressed to find a match-three game that just rewards arbitrary frantic clicking), time is still of the essence – so holding out for a combo of 12 blocks when you can easily clear three groups of three blocks, that may be the better solution.

One thing that really stands in your way when it comes to succeeding at Rainbow Rush is the “energy” count. Unlike some match-three games such as Panda Jam, which deals the user five lives which expire when you fail to win a level, Rainbow Rush deals things a little differently. Taking on a level at all causes you to expel energy, whether or not you win. This means that you can only play a certain number of levels before your energy runs out, and you then have to wait for it to replenish – whether or not you are good at the game.

It feels discouraging for players and may decrease motivation, because where’s the motivation to win when you’re going to lose your life anyway? It’s a strategy to gain money for the game, because the game monetizes through the sale of premium game currency which can buy you more energy.

Is it worth it? Well, it is if you really, really enjoy the game.

• When it comes to power-ups, it is very helpful that all of the power-ups are available off the bat – but it can also be divisive. You start out with a good deal of currency, so it may be tempting to spend it all on power-ups, but for the first stage power-ups of any kind are completely unnecessary – you can easily three-star each level relying on just your matching skills.
• Leave your power-ups to rest for the first stage and save your money. Let even more accumulate as you win each level, because you’ll need it in the next few levels.
• One of the biggest score boosters is to attempt to get as many combos as quickly as possible – ten in ten seconds will result in a “frenzy” bonus, which will briefly result in the blocks surrounding your combos to explode as well. Fifteen or twenty combos in ten seconds will result in even more power. Some power-ups are well worth the price – such as a power-up that will plant random clocks throughout the game board.
• Clicking on the clocks will add two seconds on to your time. The best thing about these clocks is that they do not have to be a part of the combo, so you can just click on them as soon as you see them and voila – you have more time! Two seconds doesn’t seem like a lot, but most players can build their skill quickly enough to be doing more than one combo per second, which is good – because the difficulty level of the stages goes up exponentially after the first segment of stages.
• Other than that, power-ups should be examined very closely for how much they’re worth, because they are quite expensive and hardly worth the purchase when you can’t even earn half of their value back in winnings.