Smiley Pops

It’s funny how drawing a smiley face on something suddenly makes it far more engaging and loveable.

Whether it’s balloons, balls, or robots, sketch a cheesy grin onto any inanimate object and you instantly inject it with personality.

It works for games, too, as Smiley Pops ably demonstrates.

Ostensibly a pretty run of the mill match-three puzzler, it becomes a whole lot more likeable thanks to the old smiley face trick mentioned above.

The art style really is the game's strong point, with each of the brilliantly expressive bubbles gurning at you in their own way. There are the angry reds, the bored blues, and the bemused pinks, to name just a few.

Of course, they’re all just playing pieces, there to be shunted around to form lines of three or more of any one colour. When they pop, more drop in from above, potentially causing a chain reaction and sending your score into the stratosphere.

While it’s neither particularly fresh nor outstandingly brilliant to play, Smiley Pops does take a slightly different approach to match-three. It stacks the balls rather more realistically than most, so each ball sits wedged in between the two below. This means that when you make a match, the balls spill and tumble into place at funny angles.

This also affects the swapping mechanic itself. Rather than swapping two balls, here you must drag across three in a tight triangle, which causes them to rotate once in the corresponding direction.

It’s this subtly different approach, as well as its vibrant presentation and Scoreloop integration, that might make Smiley Pops worth considering if you’re after yet another match-three puzzler (unlikely as that may be).

It’s neither deep nor original, but at least the bubbles have smiley faces on them. What more do you want?