We often evaluate games based on originality—something refreshing is often good, because it means we’re in for a new playing experience. However, that shouldn’t be the only thing that makes a game good. In this case, it’s true that Safari Sketch is another game of match-3, just like Bejewelled. Your objective here is to clear the green squares lying beneath the playing tiles, achieved by swapping them around to form matches of three or more. While that’s nothing significantly new, we’re confident you’ll still find plenty of lovely things within, making this game a beauty to play.

In Safari Sketch, you’ll be travelling across the many continents to complete sketches of flora and fauna. Each drawing is made by finishing a round of match-3, and comes with educational information on the plant or animal species at hand. All of these are collected in your little journal that you can review at any time.

The mechanic is rather typical, but there are still some interesting additions to take note of. Stubborn rocks and bubbles will find their way into your playing field. These obstacles cannot be cleared, so you’ll have to do your best in working around them until they pass through. Something more challenging you’ll find though, is the “black cross”. These horrid marks block out the rest of the row it resides in. Nasty, but these help make interesting level designs. You might start off cornered by these black crosses, with only a few accessible tiles on the grid to play with. As you successfully remove these barriers though, the rest of the grid opens up, giving you that rewarding sense of “expansionism.” A little harmless territorial conquest in puzzle games never hurt anyone, yes?

The largest appeal in this game perhaps, is in its familiar match-3 mechanic presented to you in a new setting and theme. Red Rover Games delivers a pleasant match-3 here, and if you’re the sort of person who can’t get enough of match-3s, you’ll certainly find this very enjoyable. Also, Safari Sketch was built in Unity, a Mac-based development tool, and that’s very sweet news for some of us. Mac users (such as myself) will be glad to have another game available on our favourite platform.

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(1 votes, average: 2 out of 5)

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