Sweet Madness review: yes, it's about candies, but it's no Candy Crush

Before you point an accusing finger at this game and say that it’s a Candy Crush rip off, let me stop you right there: it isn’t.

Sweet Madness is a game by Vietnamese game developer Guava 7. I’ve tried two of its previous games Cerberus the Dog and Game for Two and I must say that this shows great improvement.

Simple becomes challenging when under time pressure

As you might have guessed and judging by the screenshots, Sweet Madness will require you to find the same-colored candies in each level. However, instead of scoring through combos by connecting as many as you can, Sweet Madness requires you to find the longest candy chain to get through a level. In fact, this screenshot is all the instruction you’ll ever get:

Looks simple, right? What it doesn’t tell you, however, is that you’re supposed to find the longest candy path before the time runs out. You’re not told exactly how many seconds you have, but there is a pink bar at the top of the screen that gives you a rough idea, and I think that small bit of uncertainty makes things more interesting.

You also get a special multi-colored candy as you progress in the game so you can connect two different candy paths to find an even longer path. Yes, still under time pressure. You might also think it’s all about finding what color dominates the level, but it’s actually finding the path that covers all these colors and that’s actually more challenging than you think.

Thank you for not forcing me to buy things

It’s no secret that we don’t like stamina systems and I thought this was going to ruin things for Sweet Madness, too. I was thankfully wrong in that department.

(See: If you put a stamina system in your game, I hate you)

Before starting a game, you are asked how many hearts you would like to go with. You are allowed a minimum of two and a maximum of five. These hearts are lives and are spent every time you make a mistake in finding the longest path. You also have gold, which is spent to buy more hearts before the game or to rescue yourself when you want to continue playing after you’ve run out of hearts in-game.