Five maps, forty levels, and a star rating that means something

The campaign is finished and it is forty levels long. Five territories — Lock & Load, Chocolate Forest, Apple Pie Factory, Danger and Steel City — of eight levels each, every map tougher than the one before it, every map ending with a commander who is not interested in being reasonable.

You start with three lives. You lose one whenever your health bar empties, and you earn an extra life every three levels you clear. Run out and the run is over, back to the map screen. Finish a map and the game rolls you straight into the next one with your score and your lives intact — only Steel City ends a run.

Every level is rated out of three stars based on how few moves you needed. Each level has a par move count, which is roughly what a clean run takes. Finish at or under par and you get three. Up to one and a half times par gets you two, and anything longer gets you one. Twenty-four stars is a perfect map.

Stars are not just a scoreboard. They pay coins, so a tidy win is worth more than a scrappy one, and chasing three stars is the fastest way to fund boosters for the maps where you will actually need them.

If you have played the earlier builds, the big change is that difficulty now ramps properly across the whole thing rather than spiking at map three. The early maps teach you the board and the later ones assume you learned it.