Store game · Puzzle
Candy Crush Saga
King's long-running match-3: thousands of candy levels, offline play and no ads, with optional paid boosters.
Get the game
Opens the official store page
- Developer
- King.com Limited
- Score
- 4.7
- Downloads
- 1M+ ratings
- Age
- Rated 12+
- Genre
- Puzzle
- Price
- Free
Screenshots
About this game
King's Candy Crush Saga needs little introduction. Candies are swapped to line up three or more of a kind, and the levels add jelly to clear, toffees and jam to get through. There are thousands of levels, and newer modes such as Gummy Dragons and Bubblegum Pop vary the basic formula. Boosters are a big part of play. Daily logins hand out free boosters and extra lives, and tools like the Lollipop Hammer, Jelly Fish and Bonbon Blitz help with the stickier levels. Time-limited events with themed challenges and tournaments with leaderboards give regulars something to chase beyond the main map. Connecting to Facebook syncs progress and makes it possible to share lives and compare scores with friends. It plays offline and, per King, is free of ads. The game itself is free, but optional in-game items cost money, and payments can be switched off in device settings.
Candy Crush Saga: the full guide
What the game is
The match-three game that most others are measured against. Swap candies to make rows of three or more, clear the jelly, break through the toffee, and move to the next node on a map that has grown to thousands of levels over more than a decade. Gummy Dragons and Bubblegum Pop are the newer modes, and they shake up the formula without replacing it.
King runs it as a service. Daily logins pay out boosters and lives, there are timed events, tournaments with leaderboards, and a Facebook link for syncing progress and comparing scores with friends. Offline play works, and King says it carries no ads.
How a session plays
Most people play it in bursts of a few minutes. Lives regenerate over time, so a run of failed attempts at a hard level ends the session for you, and that rhythm is deliberate. The early hundreds of levels are gentle. Later ones are tuned so that a booster, whether a Lollipop Hammer or a Jelly Fish, is the difference between finishing and trying again tomorrow.
The map gives a sense of progress, and the periodic events and tournaments give regulars a reason to open it on days when the main level isn't going well.
Why people look for it
Familiarity. It's the match-three game that people who don't play games have heard of, and a large share of searches are from players who had it on an old phone and want it back with their progress intact, which the Facebook sync handles. The absence of ads is a smaller but real factor for anyone burned by the genre's usual interruptions.
Look and feel
Candy Crush's look is so established that the five screenshots will hold few surprises: saturated sweets on a soft pastel board, a winding level map, and heavy use of bounce and sparkle when combos fire. It's cheerful and loud rather than tasteful. The interface is built for thumbs, with large tiles and very little text, which is a big part of why it travelled so far.
Updates and upkeep
Over a million ratings at 4.7 puts this in a different tier of scale from almost anything else in the batch. King.com is a dedicated puzzle studio and the game is its flagship, so neglect isn't a realistic concern. Our page links only the App Store version. The description mentions newer modes, which is consistent with an actively extended game, though no release dates are given.
