First launched in 2014 on iOS and now available on Android, Seriously’s Best Fiends is a crossover of a puzzle matching and role-playing game that is the first installment of a series of coming games that feature unlikely heroes on an epic journey as they battle against fiendish foes.
Best Fiends is developed by Seriously, a gaming studio brought together by a few members previously on the team of Rovio, the developer of the addictive game, Angry Birds. The story behind Best Fiends is a group of creatures in Minutia team up together to battle against the Slugs on Mount Doom.
The gameplay is simple, similar to that of Candy Crush or Angry Birds where we proceed through by beating level by level of different and increasingly challenging puzzles. It is a puzzle matching game where there are five colors that match the five types of fiends that we have. Each puzzle level has different objectives from eliminating a certain number of slugs to collecting crystals or linking a certain color to match, etc., to be achieved in a set number of moves. At the end of each level, there are keys that will unlock crates that will have different rewards of new fiends or yellow or blue meteormites (that are useful for leveling up the fiends).
After playing around 50 levels (among the hundreds of levels currently available), Best Fiends is everything you’d expect from a mobile game. It’s simple and easy to play but hard to master. At around level 20, the difficulty levels start becoming a little more challenging. The level-ups for the fiends are more complex as it requires more meteormites and these are hard to accumulate as it takes solely luck to acquire them. The little fiends are all adorable based on different tweaks on bugs. Not only do the bugs vary in their special abilities, the slugs also vary from ones that lose teeth or spit on the puzzle board to others that have shields for a specific match type. All these add as an extra challenge and requires much patience and perseverance to pass the levels especially when the puzzle board themselves have ice walls or twig walls depending on the environment it is.
The question at the end of the day is that in the hugely popular market of addictive puzzle games, does Best Fiends live up to the hype? Will it be able to grab a place? There is no doubt that Best Fiends has the potential but puzzle matching is not novel in the market and this levels on whether the RPG and Puzzle matching crossover works. The concept of leveling up out multiple fiends through their 5 evolutions is great. The visuals are pleasant and cute. The puzzle matching is addictive with its objectives and increasing challenge. However, it also has an energy meter that runs out and part of this is based on luck. It relies on spending money (like other mobile games in the similar genre) to keep playing. Best Fiends, like its predecessors, is addictive, fun and cute until the levels become repetitive to pass and energy runs out and we can move on to another game while we wait for the recharge.