Match Three: Pirates! Heir to Davy Jones

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Match 3 Adventure Collection bundle, along with Gems of Magic: Lost Family. It is also included in the Super Puzzle Pack bundle, along with Candy 2048 Challenge, Jigsaw Fun: Piece It Together, Gems of Magic: Lost Family, and Yum Yum Line.)

Match Three: Pirates! Heir to Davy Jones is a family-friendly Match-3 Puzzle game released in 2019 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game features a story about a mother chasing after her son who was magically whisked away to a pirate-themed world, who must reunite with them by… matching gems, for some reason? Yeah, the story really doesn’t matter here, this is all about the gameplay… which is basically just Bejeweled.

If you’ve never played Bejeweled, you’ve almost certainly played one of the countless games based on its gameplay of swapping adjacent tiles to create matching rows of three or more like-colored whatevers, in this case gemstones (just like Bejeweled). Match Three: Pirates! doesn’t do anything truly revolutionary for the genre, simply having players try to hit specified clear totals within a limited number of moves. However, there is at least enough variety in bonus tiles and hazard tiles to keep things interesting.

The presentation here is at least decent, using bright, colorful 2D visuals that make it very easy to distinguish the different types of gems from each other. This is backed by some pretty decent if not especially memorable piratey-themed tunes that fit the game’s lighthearted tone very well, along with decent enough voice acting for the characters in story bits. Overall, nothing fantastic, but nothing to complain about either.

In terms of features, Match Three: Pirates! Heir to Davy Jones has touchscreen support, which is nice, but it doesn’t have any sort of multiplayer. And it doesn’t help that there are a million and one games out there that play very similar to this. As such, the $10 price tag on this game seems a bit much, and you just know it’s only there to make it seem like a deal when the game inevitably goes on sale for the far more reasonable $2.

In that case, I suppose I’d say that Match Three: Pirates! Heir to Davy Jones is worth the $2, though it’s not the most memorable Puzzle game, or even the most memorable Bejeweled-clone, by a longshot. There are numerous other Bejeweled clones on Nintendo Switch, even some quite good ones, even free-to-play ones like Gems of War. As such, this game may be enjoyable, but it’s hard to recommend it against the crowd.

tl;dr – Match Three: Pirates! Heir to Davy Jones is a family-friendly Match-3 Puzzle game that’s basically a knockoff of Bejeweled. The piratey theme and reasonably varied levels keep things interesting enough here, but not enough to project it above countless better takes on this exact same gameplay formula on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}