Rovio, the developer behind the popular Angry Birds games, today announced that it has published a third title under its “Rovio Stars” banner. Rovio Stars is the developer’s publishing initiative to find and promote games from studios other than Rovio. The initiative has already published two other games this year, Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage and Tiny Thief, a hidden-object adventure game.
The third Rovio Stars game is titled Juice Cubes, and is out for free on iOS and Android today, with a Facebook version of the game “to follow soon.” The game comes from Thai developer Pocket PlayLab.
“After rejecting several big publishers and determined to do it ourselves, Rovio came knocking on the door and we very quickly found a perfect match in terms of our combined teams and fans,” said Jakob Lykkegaard, co-founder of Pocket Playlab. “Working together on the release has shown that this was a great decision and we are looking forward to working with Rovio for many years to come.”
Juice Cubes itself is similar to games such as Bejeweled and Candy Crush. Instead of jewels or candy, colored fruit cubes fall Tetris-style from the top of the screen as players connect those colors to juice fruit and create combos. The launch trailer for the title shows off gameplay that should be very familiar to tablet and smartphone gamers at this point: