Bobble Blast Deluxe

Such is the prevalence of match-three puzzlers on mobile that it's sometimes easy to forget that linking up balls in lines of three actually gets you very little in real life.

Bobble Blast Deluxe, like Zuma, Luxor, and Stoneloop before it, is a particular breed of match-three, however.

Marble madness

Rather than massing at the top of the screen, the marbles in Bobble Blast Deluxe sneak down a series of tracks level after level. Your goal is to clear them all before they fall into a well at the end of the run.

To do so, you fire off a series of your own marbles from stones at the bottom of the screen. Aiming is simple enough: keys '4' and '6' shift the angle left and right respectively, while '5' fires the marble off towards its goal.

Actually hitting your target, however, is not such a pushover, with each bunch of marbles slowing working their way down the track as you line up your shot.

Levels also increasingly come with obstacles aplenty. Walls you can bounce your marbles off occasionally help you to reach far flung areas, but more often than not they block your path to glory.

It's the implementation of such obstructions that, at times, gets a little too much. Some stages give you only the smallest of margins in which to get your shots through, making success either a case of pot lock or frustratingly lengthy bouts of trial and error.

What saves Bobble Blast Deluxe, however, is the variety it manages to offer from one level to the next – both in terms of physical design and the way in which the levels play out.

One stage, for instance, is more like a reaction test mini-game than a typical match-three style challenge, the task being to flip between different launch sites in quick succession. A question of pure speed rather than craft or judgment, it has a whole different feel to the bulk of play.

Add in the game's assortment of power-ups – activated when you clear marbles marked with special symbols – and Bobble Blast Deluxe really has the power to change from one minute to the next.

It's the ability to master these power-ups, which range from clearing marbles en masse to temporarily halting their steady progress towards the well, that is often the difference between a narrow victory and a crushing defeat.

That's the very balance Bobble Blast Deluxe finds itself playing throughout, in truth.

There's no escaping the fact that, from foundations to fruition, this is essentially an echo of all the similar puzzlers that have gone before.

On the other hand, that doesn't invalidate what's on offer here – if games are measured purely on the fun they serve up, then ones like Bobble Blast Deluxe will always score well.