Bubble Boom

Some TV shows are designed to allow you to just drift off. Watching Big Brother, for example, is not unlike sitting alone in a work canteen. Your ears might prick up as soon as any gossip starts flowing from another table or if an argument flares up, but mostly you’re left daydreaming, wondering how many hours are left in the day.

Playing Bubble Boom is equally lackadaisical. Apart from the occasional moment that demands your attention, you can mostly just drift through gazing at the colours. While this makes for a pleasant casual distraction, a lack of variety and challenge pops this bubble before it booms.

Bubble Boom features a line of bubbles snaking from one end of the screen to the other. Your goal is to match coloured bubbles in groups of three, clearing them so as to prevent the line from reaching the end of the screen.

You do this using additional bubbles that fall continuously from the top of the screen, tilting your handset to move the bubbles and make matches.

In each level, you have to destroy the entire line of bubbles, match a certain number of bubbles of a specific colour, or survive for a set length of time. In all cases, if the bubble trail reaches the end it’s game over. The penalties for losing aren’t all that serious, though, since you can just replay the level ad infinitum.

The game claims to have 42 levels, but after you’ve finished the last you're returned to the first level with a hastier pace. It calls it level 43, too. This uninspired and wholly unnecessary prolonging of the game is symptomatic of what’s wrong with Bubble Boom. It’s a competently-executed puzzler than never rises above mediocrity.

A port of a mobile game now a few years old, the visuals are pleasant and vividly recreated for the handset's higher resolution screen. Use of the accelerometer, however, slows the pace in a way that removes the tension and peril that Bubble Boom could otherwise drum up.

Only the timed levels pose any real challenge, even as you’re getting towards the end of the game's core level set. There is a slight difficulty curve, but once you’ve got used to the tilt control you won’t find much of a challenge here.

Equally, there aren’t any new elements introduced as you progress. The levels are split into three environments, yet all this amounts to is a different background.

There are power-ups that pause time, blow up bubbles, and reverse the movement of the trail, but they appear so rarely that the impact on play is negligible. The recycling of level objectives is transparent, a disappointment as you realise there’s nothing new in store with each passing level.