Candy Crush: Soda Saga
Mobile
A few years ago when I got my first smart phone, I decided to check out the game Candy Crush. Facebook was always giving me notifications from friends who were playing the game, and honestly it was a bit irritating. I didn’t intend to sit down and play it for a long time. I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Little did I know that I would end up getting completely sucked in by the charms of the game. I became one of those cell-phone obsessed people that I had always previously judged and looked down upon. Whenever I had a free moment, I was on my phone playing Candy Crush. This lasted for months and months on end, and eventually years! It opened the door for me to play other mobile games as well. Although I mainly play these other titles now, I still come back to the original Candy Crush from time to time. Mainly when I am out of lives on my other games.
One of those other games is a spinoff of Candy Crush, simply titled Candy Crush: Soda Saga. It released back in 2014. I was such a big Candy Crush fan that I immediately rushed out and downloaded this game right away when it first came out. When I started playing it, I quickly realized that it was very similar to the original game, but with a few added twists thrown in. For example – in this game you can combine four colored pieces into a square shape. This will create a fish piece, which when activated will swim off and help you out. For example if you are trying to clear the board but have a pesky piece in the corner that you can’t seem to get at, you can create a fish and activate it. It will swim off and take out that troublesome piece for you. If you need to eliminate all the chocolates in a stage, fish automatically seek out and destroy chocolates, leaving everything else alone. The fish do different things depending on the type of level you are playing. Whatever your goal is, those fish are going to help you out. I am not going to lie, they help a LOT and are probably the single biggest addition to the Candy Crush series that this game has made. When I switch back to the original Candy Crush game I am always sad that you cannot create fish over there.
Another new item you can create is the “coloring candy.” This is created in a similar fashion to the color bomb in the first game. You create it by matching up five colors in a row, but the middle candy has to be the same color as the next adjacent colored candy in a row. This candy, instead of eliminating a color like the color bomb does, will turn all candies of one color to the same color as the coloring candy. So if you create a coloring candy that is yellow, you can swipe it into a red piece and it will turn all the red pieces on the board to yellow. This move comes in big handy sometimes, especially when you are combining it with a fish or a striped candy. It creates double the havoc that a normal color bomb would in the same circumstance. Combine a coloring candy with a color bomb, and it destroys virtually everything on the screen. This is SUPER handy, but rare to make happen.
Those are the two new candy pieces that this game allows you to create. Otherwise, everything else about the way you play the game is the same as in the original title. Create an L shape to make a bomb. Create up and down or left and right shooting striped candy by lining up 4 pieces in a row. Five in a row creates the aforementioned color bomb. The games does throw in a few wrinkles at you the deeper you get into it, but nothing too hard to figure out. It introduces honeycomb pieces that act as obstacles you have to break through. There are also these weird frosting chunks you have to destroy. New here are white chocolate pieces that take two hits to destroy, and regenerate at twice the rate of the regular chocolate pieces first seen in the original game. None of these changes are too groundbreaking though. If you played the original Candy Crush, you should have no trouble jumping into this game and immediately getting the hang of it.
Why is the game called Soda Saga, you may ask? You find out pretty quickly. Certain stages contain bottles of soda that you have to break. Break the bottles, and soda starts to rise up onto the playing field from the bottom of the screen. This affects the game’s gravity, as any pieces you destroy located within the soda will be replaced from the bottom of the screen as opposed to the top. If you break any pieces above the soda line, replacement pieces continue to fall from the top of the screen. Some stages simply require that you break all of the stage’s soda bottles. Other stages have bears that float in the soda, and it is your goal to get the bears to the “finish line” by raising the soda level and maneuvering the bears to their destination.
There is a little extra variety in the stages this time around. Certain stages contain bears that are hidden below candy pieces that are covered in ice. You have to break away the ice and uncover all the bears to pass the stage. Other stages have bears hidden in honeycomb chunks. There are the aforementioned soda stages. Certain stages demand that you eliminate all the chocolate on the playing field. Others have you spread jelly to every square on the playing field, kind of the opposite of the stages in the first game where you have to destroy all the shaded tiles. There are probably more, too, that I am not remembering. Gone are the timed “high score” stages and any stages where you have to create a certain number of items in order to pass.
Honestly, there is a lot about this game that is superior to the first Candy Crush. Better “graphics”. Faster paced gameplay. The ability to create fish. Better level variety. The stages themselves just seem a lot more fun and action packed this time around; there is a lot more going on onscreen in this game than there is in the first. I have basically abandoned the first game in favor of this one. But like I said, I do come back to the first one from time to time when I am out of lives on my other games. But in a way, this game has made the first one a bit obsolete in my mind. This doesn’t necessarily guarantee a higher score than the original though.
Let’s get to what I didn’t like about this game. First of all: some of the earlier levels seemed to be broken when I first started this game. I am sure they have all been fixed through patches by now, but HOT DAMN were some of those stages nearly impossible to beat back then. I specifically remember a level where you had to raise three bears to the top of the screen while destroying honeycombs to expose soda pieces that you needed to destroy to keep raising the soda level higher. But halfway through the stage the game would stop giving you soda pieces, making it impossible to get your bears to the top of the screen. I was stuck on that one for weeks and weeks on end before they fixed it. Another stage had you trying to free all the bears trapped in honey. OK, cool – there are a lot of stages like that in this game. But this one in particular was virtually impossible to beat because they only gave you a few spaces at the top of the screen to make moves, while only giving you a tiny amount of moves to make to begin with. The screen would shift down three times there was so much honey to destroy. But with only 20 or so moves to beat the stage with, every single move had to be some kind of giant combo cascade in order to even have a shot at beating the game. Again, I was stuck on that stage for weeks on end before it was fixed and made winnable.
I don’t know if that is a deliberate thing the makers of the game did in order to slow down the players while they created new levels… or maybe to force players to buy items and extra continues. Who knows? But wow was it frustrating! Even though it is not as bad now, I still encounter stages that I get stuck on for days and weeks on end. And it is not like I am dumb or don’t know what I am doing when it comes to Candy Crush. As far as stages go, I am in the thousands in all three Candy Crush iterations. So I know it ain’t me being dumb. It is just flat out bad level design.
The game also seems to be more luck-based than the original Candy Crush. There are a lot of stages that start off with a limited number of moves you can make. You make a move, and then there is only one possible move you can make, so you HAVE to make that move. Then there is still only one possible move left, so you go ahead and make that move. Then another. Then another. Before you know it, you have wasted six or seven of your moves and accomplished absolutely nothing with those moves. I don’t know what it is about this version of Candy Crush, but this happens to me quite often when playing this game. I have even invented a term that I use in my head whenever I come across this problem: floundering.
The game was also very light on “extra” features when it first debuted. Meaning there was no way to earn items like the first game where you could spin the prize wheel. What you started the game with was what you got. This has been fixed through updates, however. Now you earn a daily bonus for playing the game every day, where the rewards get progressively better the more days in a row you play. I got up into the 80s or 90s once, but then I took a long nap after coming home from work one day and did not play the game before the clock turned to midnight. I ended up dropping all the way down back to day one again. I was so mad! The game also gives you overall goals that you can work on to gain extra items, things like “destroy 1000 cyan colored candies” or “progress through three hard stages”. Complete these goals and you get free stuff. New goals then pop up for you to complete. And thus the cycle continues. So there are lots of ways to earn items here, which is great!
It is hard for me to attach a grade to this game because the game as it appears now is far different from the game that debuted back in 2014. If you had asked me to grade the game back then, it would have gotten a really good score. It was new, it was fast paced. Although it was lacking in features, it was still a lot of fun. Then it got stagnant for a while with the impossible to pass levels and no way to gain extra items. It would have gotten a crap score at that point in time. Then it got good again with all the updates and new ways to earn items.
What I am going to base my grade on is my overall impression of the game. While the game may NOW have fixed its issues and become a lot more fun to play, I can’t forget about all the lows the game has suffered over the years. The impossible levels, the dearth of added frills and bonus items, the slog I hit a few hundred levels in that nearly killed the game for me. At the same time I have to acknowledge the fact that NOW in its present state, the game is technically probably a better game than the original Candy Crush, which got an A+ from me. That said, part of the reason the original game got such a high score was how groundbreaking it was, and how it had left such a huge impression on me. This game, unfortunately, did not quite leave the same impression on me. Which is not to say I don’t like the game, because I do. Ask anyone I know - I am always on my phone playing this damn thing.
Candy Crush: Soda Saga gets everything right that a sequel should. This isn’t just a straight up clone with no changes made. It also is not so drastically different that you would not recognize this as a Candy Crush title. It takes the original formula of the game and expands and adds to it at the same time. The end result is a really fun game with its own distinct personality that sets it apart from its predecessor. You can’t just say “I’m playing Candy Crush” when you are playing this game. No. You are playing Soda Saga. There is a HUGE difference between this game the original.
If you are anti Candy Crush and oppose everything that the series stands for, chances are you won’t play this game. If you like Candy Crush, chances are you are probably already playing it. Personally, I think the series gets far too much hate than it should. People who dislike it without having played it are probably the same kind of people who hate things simply because they are too mainstream. I know people who refuse to watch Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad or drink pumpkin spice lattes for this very reason, and it is stupid. This is an excellent game. I also don’t believe the theory that mobile games don’t count as “real” video games. As someone who has been gaming my whole life (I was born in 1982), this is just as valid as a video game as something like Super Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, or Tetris.
Fun game, sensational time killer. All of its growing pains, however, are what is keeping it from a higher overall grade.
Overall:
A-
If you liked my Soda Saga review, please check out a few of my other game reviews:
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