It’s kind of funny — I grew up in the Florida Keys, so to me (and probably to most people, actually), the ocean is all about tranquility. However, Sea Rascals, which is set in the ocean? Makes me frantic! Admittedly, it’s a good kind of frantic, but nonetheless… stress!

Sea Rascals by Pajamahouse Studios is a fast-paced match-three game with a few twists to help keep things interesting. While Sea Rascals may take a round or two to get the hang of things, once you get going, it’s incredibly hard to stop (it is for me, anyway!). Sea Rascals is the kind of game that leads you to say “OK, one more game” about ten times.

The premise of Sea Rascals is simple, and very familiar if you’ve played other match-three games like Bejeweled — put together matching groups of three or more items to make them disappear from the board. Unlike most match-three games, in which players swap adjacent jewels/tiles/etc, in Sea Rascals, you can swap any two sea creatures, wherever their location on the board.

Which, on one hand, is absolutely great — you rarely end up completely stuck with no moves to make. On the other hand, the temptation to gather, say, all of the red-and-yellow fish can be pretty intense, which might result in a massive pileup of all the other types of Sea Rascals, because you took too long. Not that I would know anything about that.

A couple of other aspects of Sea Rascals help keep the game challenging. First of all, more creatures are constantly sinking down from above, causing the screen to fill up (think Tetris). Once the creatures are piled all the way to the top, you’re — pardon the ocean pun — sunk. Making your task that much more difficult are various bits of ocean debris (tin cans, abandoned surfboards) that absolutely will not be cleared until you create a chain reaction of multiple groups of three. Oh, and just in case you don’t catch on for yourself: you have to tap the groups of three (or more) in order to make them disappear.

Sea Rascals is a really fun, wildly addictive game. The graphics and music are both nicely done and the local and global high score cards are likely to bring out the competitive side in just about anyone, making the replay value for Sea Rascals pretty high.

Check out this brief video to see Sea Rascals in action.

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category: Editor's Picks, Games, Puzzle