Bubble Town

Considering it's called Bubble Town, this game does a pretty good job of making itself sound complicated. There are aliens, borbs, shrouds, lumps and overlumps to contend with - in fact a lot of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with bubbles.

Thankfully it couldn't be simpler to play though. This is the sort of puzzle game which, as soon as you've fired your first few practice shots, you get very quickly. It uses a very simple match-up-three-of-a-kind premise, although keeps expanding on this throughout by changing the rules and objectives slightly in each level, as well as introducing new power-ups along the way.

Bubble Town is a mobile remake of a PC game called Scrubbles. Being a fairly unknown game you might not remember it, but Bubble Town is still likely to be familiar to most gamers. That's because its pointing and firing of bubble-like 'borbs' is very similar to the classic game Puzzle Bobble.

Of course, when we say similar, we mean that it'd probably be easier to pick out differences between the Dolly the sheep and her clones than between Puzzle Bobble and Bubble Town's core gameplay. You fire circular borbs from a cannon at the bottom of the screen, moving it left and right to aim each shot. Get three like-coloured borbs in a cluster and they fall down, and so do any others that are clinging to them. As you play, the level's ceiling gradually drops down too. If any borbs make it to the bottom of the screen then it's game over. Just like in Puzzle Bobble.

Fortunately, Bubble Town does throw in a few of its own ideas. For a start, there are power-ups you collect by hitting the bubbles that contain them. Examples of these include the Sure Shot which puts a target up to show exactly where your borb will land when fired, and the Hotfoot, which zaps straight through everything in its path.

The borbs themselves also have a bit more personality than plain old bubbles. Each has a little face and they even nod off to sleep. Sleeping borbs need to be hit with a like-colour to wake them up, then they disappear the next time they're hit.

In addition, there are levels which divert from the standard vertically shaped ones, bunching the borbs in a rotating shape in the centre of the screen. The bosses, which appear every few levels, use a similar formula. You need to clear the borbs surrounding the central 'overlump' boss to kill him.

The variety each level offers means that Bubble Town is compelling to play right to the end. The constantly evolving tactics you need to discover to clear a level in time also makes it a lot tougher than you might imagine it would be to fire coloured blobs into one another.

Yet there are only 31 levels, which isn't that many for a puzzle game. They start to get difficult fast however so Bubble Town proves itself to be quite a challenge. Levels start you off with packed screens full of borbs and you soon realise that one mistake can mess up several minutes of carefully considered aiming. Thankfully the game also has that one-more-try addictive quality that'll keep you playing it for longer than you probably should.

Ultimately then, while Bubble Town isn't particularly original it gets under your skin just as any good puzzle game should and includes enough of its own ideas to ensure it's not so similar to Puzzle Bobble you'd feel cheated.