Rondo Adventure Review – Falling Jelly

In Rondo Adventure you enter the world of Rondo, inhabited by cute, round, little jellies. Help the good jellies save the Jelly Princess who has been kidnapped by the Bad Jelly. It’s a traditional video game plot presented with a cute cartoon aesthetic.

The story is conveyed through simple little cut scenes. The cute aesthetic is accompanied by a nice soundtrack and fitting sound effects. But let’s talk about what really matters, the gameplay.

The goal of each level is to get from point A to point B in order to catch up with the Bad Jelly and save the Princess. To do that player’s will need to draw a path through soil for their jelly to travel along using touch controls, making it well-suited for mobile platforms.

As a physics puzzler you’ll have to use trajectory and momentum to navigate obstacles and collect three stars located around each level. Getting all three stars will often take more than one go at a level. It can be quite a challenge to get top score on some levels and players will really have to use their brains to figure it out.

In later levels, new elements are added to the puzzles, such as buttons and timing obstacles, increasing the difficulty of completing each level as you go. There are also some interesting bonus levels that use screen rotation to guide your jelly along the drawn path, which is a fun way to change things up from the standard mechanics. Rondo Adventure does a good job of introducing and explaining the mechanics of the game without giving any of the puzzle solutions away so that players never feel like they don’t know what to do nor that they are having their hands held.

As a free-to-play game, it has ads and in-app purchases. The ads are just still images for other games that can be clicked away without leaving the game. If that bothers you it costs $1.99 to get rid of them. However, more annoying than the ads are the limited lives.

You can store up to 25 lives, and they take time to regenerate when you use one. Of course, you can buy more lives, a larger reserve of lives, or the ability to regenerate faster. Also available for purchase are hints to help you get through tough levels or a pass to let you skip a level. The later IAPs seem a little pay-to-win, but there’s no competitive play or leader-board.

Rondo Adventure is an interesting physics-based puzzler with unique and challenging gameplay. It’s fun to figure out how to get all three stars and make it to the end of the level. However, getting full completion on a level can take many tries, which will take many lives. Within five minutes of working on a hard level, players may find themselves out of lives and unable to play without waiting and taking you out of the game.

Personally, I’d rather pay once for unlimited lives than to eliminate ads, but all-in-all it’s a fun and challenging puzzle game.

This game was downloaded by the reviewer and reviewed on the Samsung Galaxy S4.