When you fail a stage in Farm Heroes Saga, you have two options - give up or use Gold Bars to continue a little longer. The goal remains the same: match Cropsies to reach a set amount, but you can make it easier by using Magic Beans collected throughout the game. I've also entered boss battles with Rancid, a skunk, and these recharge over time or can be bought.

When struggling, you can use Boosters, which grant special powers like removing a single Cropsie without using a move. You feel proud of yourself for being so smart before moving on to the next level.

Currently, I'm trying to remove Flowers from the play area by matching adjacent Cropsies, similar to clearing Liquorice squares in Candy Crush. Sometimes things seem hopeless, but then you make a few good moves and finish with a flourish. It's likely similar to the rush that gamblers experience, making it difficult to stop playing.

As I've been playing for several days now, I can confirm that Farm Heroes Saga is essentially a re-skinned version of Candy Crush Saga. Despite this, I've found myself unable to tear away from it at times.

The game works well enough, but nothing has gotten me excited yet. You're given a score out of three based on your performance and can compare totals with friends. Matching specific icons awards extra Cropsies as a bonus. Some Cropsies have a '+' symbol along with a number.

When starting the first levels, you're presented with a tiled board filled with Cropsies - icons representing fruit, vegetables, and suns - which you then proceed to match three or more in a horizontal or vertical row to remove them from play. This adds to your running tally of Cropsies, and if you reach the required number, you win the level and enter Hero mode, where you can earn bonus points by matching even more Cropsies.

The game prompts you to log in via Facebook so you can view friends' scores, and you begin on a world map at the start of a long path of levels that you'll work your way through to complete the game. Is Farm Heroes Saga just King's own game? Or does it iterate on the basic formula established by Bejeweled to provide a new take on a classic?

For now, Farm Heroes Saga sticks closely to the Candy Crush Saga style of play. It comes hot on the heels of King's social casual-puzzler Papa Pear Saga, which took the structure of Peggle and applied its own free-to-play twist. From what I've seen so far, it seems that King has gone back to the well and is lifting a lot of ideas from its successful match-three puzzler Candy Crush Saga.

Farmheroes saga