The addictive fruit popping game Juice Cubes is now available for iOS and Android! The game comes courtesy of Rovio Stars — Rovio’s third-party publishing company — and is developer Pocket PlayLab. The game is completely free to download, so either search your App Store or try rov.io/juicecubes. The app will be appearing on Facebook in the near future as well!
The backstory is that the welfare of these adorable, wide-eyed fruity cubes is being threatened by an evil island blender… and I can’t help but to chuckle while writing that. Anyways, pass the levels or condemn the fruit to a blade-spinning fate!
The gameplay is a spin on the oh-so-popular game Candy Crush (aka, candy-themed Bejeweled). But instead of swapping two items to create rows or columns of three or more of the same candy, in Juice Cubes we connect three or more cubes / fruits in any direction desired. You can connect horizontally, vertically, or diagonally! Strings of three fruit is the minimum.
Tip! Let’s talk! Share your tips, tricks, hints, strategies and more in our new forum topic!
General Info
The initial release (which is v1.07.12) features over 165 levels spread across several maps! All levels are chronological, it appears.
Objectives include: Score thresholds, clearing sand blocks, dropping buckets off the bottom of the screen, and time-capped score thresholds. There are even more objectives still, but this gives you an idea of some of the early requirements.
5 regenerating hearts count your lives. Fail to earn a star and you lose a heart, which will take 20 minutes to return. You also lose a heart if you chose exit a level.
Gold Bars are the in-game currency. These can be earned in normal gameplay or purchased with cold hard cash.
Lots of boosters, unlockables, and in-app purchases are available. These include increasing your heart meter from 5 to 8, freezing time in the time-capped speed levels, extra moves, starting with “explosive fruit”, and more.
Tips and Tricks
Strings of 3 fruit simply disappear for a few points. Strings of 4-7 fruit creates “explosive fruit“. Strings of 8+ fruit creates a powerful “fruit sandwich“! Activate the special fruit’s power by connecting it in a normal 3+ string, or by swapping with any other special tile.
In a string of 4+ fruit, the special fruit is always the last one in the string. So it may be worthwhile to undo your selection (simply trace your path backwards) and reverse the order, if it will put two bombs next to each other.
In strings of 4-7 fruit, how you end your string determines the bomb type:
End moving vertically: The bomb will clear the entire column when activated.
End moving horizontally: The bomb will clear the entire row when activated.
End moving diagonally: The bomb will clear all immediately-adjacent fruit when activated.
A fruit sandwich bomb in a string of 3+ (say) strawberries will clear every strawberry on-screen.
There is no cascading effect, so it is worthwhile on “pure score” levels to leave as many “explosive fruit” as possible for the very end. An exception might be combining two explosive fruits to clear out massive areas.
In the sand-removal or bucket-dropping levels, you are nearly guaranteed three stars if you can complete the objective with 2+ moves remaining. Don’t worry so much about saving explosive fruit on this one. For each extra move you have in the bank, you earn 3000 points AND an explosive fruit appears in the grid.
Our Coverage
There isn’t much in terms of strategies or walkthroughs that can be done for Juice Cubes, since the alignment of fruit will vary greatly between tries. However, we will cover news-related items such as bug-fix and map-addition updates right here on AngryBirdsNest.
Suggestions, Bugs, and Miscellany
I humbly suggest delaying the “hint” a bit longer. As is, the game suggests a move (usually a simply 3-fruit string) after about 3 seconds of inactivity. It can be very distracting, especially when the level first loads and you’re looking for a sweet 8-fruit combo!
As is the major complaint with Candy Crush, the “pay to continue” premise meet most users with disappointment. (Level 20)
