Pet Rescue Saga is a matching game with adorable animals!
Cats, dogs, and piglets, oh my! King is at it again with yet another “saga” game, this time featuring our furry and feathered friends. Tugging on heartstrings and manipulating people’s feelings by appealing to everyone’s love for pets is a cruel, underhanded move; and yet, nobody can deny that Pet Rescue Saga is a darn addicting matching game. Curse you, King, for publishing such cute games that are so hard to quit!
The mechanics of Pet Rescue Saga are simple: match any two colors to disappear them into thin air and earn points. This is less than the usual match-3 game, which typically has you matching… well, a minimum of 3 items to Thanos them out of existence. In this regard, it is easier to match, however, that doesn’t mean it’s any less interesting.
Pets Saga Pets
The main differentiator here is the actual “Pets” aspect of the game. Some match-3 games have you simply clearing a minimum percentage of the stage, or all of it, to win. In Pet Rescue Saga though, the win conditions are varied, and one of them is to–you guessed it!–rescue pets.
Pets are rescued by vanishing the column of blocks they’re sitting on until they reach the bottom of the stage. Once they do, they too are disappeared (presumably off back to their rightful owners) and the game awards the player bonus points. Lovely points! A fair exchange for someone’s beloved best animal friend.
Each level has multiple objectives to win, oftentimes by reaching a minimum amount of points or clearing a certain percentage of blocks while simultaneously rescuing a certain number of pets. The challenge comes from meeting these requirements within the limited moves players are allowed per level. See? Just because it’s essentially a “match-2” game doesn’t mean it isn’t hard!
Some Quick Tips and Tricks
With that in mind, here are a few tips and tricks that might be useful for players new to matching games, or even those who’ve played for a while but find themselves getting stuck in Pet Rescue Saga in particular:
If you need to quit a level because it’s too hard, you can click on the quit icon at the top-right of the screen. But take note that if you do so while playing, you will lose a life! You only get five lives to start with and you lose one any time you fail or quit a puzzle. If you run out, you’ll have to either wait for them to refresh, or buy five more as an in-app purchase. If you’re truly desperate, you can also go and bother your Facebook friends for lives and vice versa like in King’s other games.
The column blaster rocket is a very useful powerup that eradicates entire columns of blocks. It works off of a built-up charge instead of a consumable. You should use these when it’s appropriate, and you don’t have to worry about it running out. The charge fills up when you remove larger groups of similar-colored blocks. When you want to use them, click the rocket icon, and then select the column you want to erase from the board.
That’s all there is to it! Go forth and rescue many pets from the horde of inexplicably falling blocks. May your matches are plentiful and your moves sufficient.