BubblePop

Welcome to BubblePop, a game that confuses annoying the player with entertaining them.

That might seem like an opening especially fraught with animosity, but the levels to which BubblePop sinks warrant some form of reaction - whether in the form of some ill tempered words on the pages of Pocket Gamer, or the sound of your fist smashing against the table after another unsuccessful crack at its pointless puzzle.

Pop goes the weasel

It's genuinely hard to grasp just what motivated 3 Dynamics to piece together BubblePop in the first place – perhaps the urge to utilise a leftover folder of particularly naff clipart is the only logical answer.

Either way, it's the use of these very pictures that throws up problem after problem during play, namely because the vast majority of them look nothing like the item they're intended to depict.

When you consider spotting said pictures is the crux of BubblePop's challenge, it's not hard to spot why much of play is such a fruitless exercise.

The concept is at least simple enough. In the game's main mode, BubblePop's screen gradually fills will bubbles adorned by different pictures (and occasionally numbers), the idea being the pop the correct ones according to an item listed at the top of the screen.

Doing so temporarily fills a portion of a gauge at the bottom of the screen that drains throughout, the game coming to a close when it finally empties in full.

Picture imperfect

The fact that most of the images look nothing like the objects in question is only half the problem.

Adding to the game's woes are both the size of said pictures – they are bizarrely and stupidly tiny – and the random nature of the items themselves. Attempting to find a set of biscuit cutters or some indiscernible hair clips in amongst a whole bevy of odd items when the seconds are counting down is no fun task.

Worse still, Shadow mode – which, as you might have guessed, replaces all the pictures with mere silhouettes – is even more fruitless, and has seemingly been included with very little thought as to how the game would play out.

But then, such words could be used to describe BubblePop as a whole, in truth.

One of the most pointless, poorly designed games you'll ever come across, BubblePop should be exclusively reserved for interrogation situations, pulled out as a last resort form of mental torture.