Bubble Bust! review

The Bust-A-Move arcade games have always caught my eyes while I was a kid. I would go to my local comic book shop, family restaurant, or mall and see at least one Puzzle-Bobble arcade system. So it’s not surprising at all for me to see the ricochet-bubble popping game style influence game developers and their games. Bubble Bust, from GameOn, is one of those games and is available on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for $0.99 with a Free version.

Group 3 and they explode. That’s the absolutely most basic way to describe Bubble Bust. If you can match 3 or more of any color, you’ll pop the bubbles and get points. The more you pop, the higher the points. If you manage to detach other colored bubbles from the main group or from the walls because you destroyed the connection, they will fall away too and provide you even more points. The goal is to collect enough points to submit to the Global highscore community.

Graphically, this is an ok presentation. As it is, you get particle explosions and bubble colors to match to make you completely neglect the background and art, so it’s easy to forgive. Bubble Bust features the most useful feature that any puzzle game should have: Colorblind mode. Switching this on will give all the bubbles little icons with a shape inside to represent the color. Fire, Clovers, and other shapes give each bubble a very clear distinction. Personally, I have a horrible time trying to see the green from the yellow and the purple from the blue. It hurts my head and really punishes me for being colorblind. That’s why I don’t like games like Bejeweled on Facebook because it just gives me a migraine. Bubble Bust gets extra points for giving me a very good colorblind option.

There are more than 70 levels to play with so the value really is worth the dollar. It’s very easy to just pick up and play Bubble Bust. The graphics and music are decent, the controls are just tap and shoot, and the many, many, stages are very well designed. I wish the colorblind option was placed in a more convenient place than deep inside the options, but besides that, Bubble Bust deserves to be played if only to relive those hours you spent in the arcade playing Bust-A-Move with the busted joystick and sticky tokens. My major wish for this app? A ricochet-path line to see exactly where my shots are going and a touch and drag style aiming system. Tapping the screen is just too inaccurate sometimes.

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of Bubble Bust! was written by Joseph Ho on January 22nd, 2011 and categorized under App Store, Games, Puzzler, Time Management. Page viewed 7025 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.