Jelly Dash: Incredibly entertaining with high replay value

If you’re in the market for an entertaining way to spend a few minutes of your day, I submit Jelly Dash. This free game is one of the more addictive titles I have played over the last few weeks.

Jelly Dash is everything you want in a casual game: colorful graphics, very simple mechanics, and high replay value. You can try to put this one down but you’ll be back in no time at all.

The premise is simple in that you are given 60 seconds to earn as many points as possible. You have a variety of shapes (red stars, yellow circles, blue squares, purple gumdrops, and green beans) that need matched up. You can do this with as few as two in a row on up to a dozen or more spread across the screen.

Drag your finger across the screen and connect together as many as possible. You can go in any direction, including diagonally. The more you get together, the more points. Snag a huge chunk (seven or more) and you can pick up multipliers and bonus effects.  Swipe a few of those together and you could clear out entire rows in multiple directions. Move fast though, it gets pretty tough to keep beating your high score.

There are more than 20 levels you can reach and various special effects items to help pick up extra points. These effects can be purchased with coins (earned in game) and range from 30 up to more than 300. I’ve yet to hit level 20 but I suspect it will cost 500 coins to use the top effect. You can opt for a 5-second head start, three extra swipes, after the countdown ends, and more. What’s more, you can cough up 6,000 coins and get a week of unlimited playing (more on that in a moment).

You can also pick up coins by liking the app on Facebook or inviting friends to play. Speaking of which, logging into Facebook creates a weekly tournament between you and your friends. You can have a friendly battle between others to see who reaches the higher levels or pulls in the best score.  Don’t have a Facebook account? Play as a guest!

Getting back to coins, you can also purchase additional coins using in-app purchases in Google Play with prices that range from $1.99 (2,000 coins) up to $99.99 (180,000) coins.

Playing is limited to five rounds (jellies) at a time but you can pick up a refresh for every new level. This is much easier to do in the first few rounds so don’t worry about running out of jellies. Indeed, you can also let the time tick down for a new jelly (7:00) or just come back to it an hour later and you’re good to go.  You can also send and receive jellies from your friends and pick up an extra play each day.

I really enjoy the fact that I can sample a bonus effect for free, simply by reaching a new plateau. This way, I can find out whether it’s worth saving up coins for bigger items. You can only choose one per round but you don’t need anymore than that anyhow. Really, I spend much of my time playing without a bonus and then buying bigger stuff every so often.

What we liked:

• Very short learning curve
• High replay value
• Facebook integration has perks
• Vibrant, colorful, and cute

Room for improvement:

• Would appreciate push notifications if someone beats your score
• Google+ log-in would be welcomed

[download_link link=”https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.orca.JellyDash” variation=”hotpink” target=”blank”]Download Jelly Dash (Google Play)[/download_link]