Dancing Bubbles

Simple ideas often make the best games. That's doubly true in the world of mobile gaming, where there's not the processing power or the graphical clout to make something expansive or awe inspiring.

Take Dancing Bubbles. What begins as a matching puzzle soon escalates into a clever, if a little unsophisticated, game of dexterity and timing. It might not look brilliant, but it'll keep you playing for longer than most games of its ilk.

The aim of the game is simple. The screen is slowly filling up with bubbles, which as the name suggests jiggle and wobble around, moving from place to place. A picture of a bubble appears at the top of the screen and you need to clear it.

You move your cursor from bubble to bubble with '2', 4, 6, and '8', and get rid of it by tapping '5'. Things are pretty easy initially, with only the bouncing of the bubbles causing you any problems.

As the game goes on though it adds new stipulations. First you'll get multiple bubbles to clear, then you'll just be told which colour you need to get rid of. After that a timer counts down and you can only clear a bubble when it hits zero.

What started as simple as finding the right bubble on the screen becomes a battle of frustration and hope as you wait for the clock to tick down, desperately hoping that the bubbles don't start to move and push the one you need to clear off the screen.

The game isn't perfect, and while it does manage to add new layers as you progress you never really feel in danger of failing. You might lose a few points here and there, but that appears to be the extent of your punishment when you mess up. The backgrounds and soundtrack get pretty repetitive too.

Still, if you're looking for a puzzle game that does things a little bit differently, while still fitting into the comfy mobile puzzling template, Dancing Bubbles is definitely worth a look. As deceptively simple games go, it's up there with the best of them.