Sunday, August 21, 2011

WP7 Game Review: Bubblo World

bubbloToday’s game is Bubblo World by Baracat.

Bubblo world is an interesting puzzle game where the objective is to pop all bubbles starting from a single tap.

Overall score 4 / 5

If I were to describe this game in one sentence, I would say that Bubblo World is a game where you have to find a Hamiltonian path in a hypergraph whose configuration you can change. Too much? Well, it is true: the nodes are the bubbles, the edges are the arrows that come out of the bubbles, and you can change the configuration of the hypergraph by changing the orientation of the bubbles.

Geeky jokes aside, Bubblo World is a kind of puzzle game that I like – it involves a long planning phase in which you set up the game field perfectly, and then with one touch, execute it, and sit back while you watch the world burn.. er.. I mean, you watch your plan succeed.

Bubblo World comprises bubbles with pointy things sticking out of one end. When the bubble is burst, the pointy thing shoots out an arrow in the direction it was pointing. There are two stages of the game – the planning stage, in which you orient the bubble correctly, so that it can pop other bubbles, and the play stage, where you tap one of the bubbles and start the chain reaction.

bubblo1
Bubblo World gamplay screen. The pink bubbles take two arrows to pop, the blue ones take one

The gameplay is fast and intuitive. At first I thought that it was tedious that there was no way to turn the bubbles counter-clockwise. As it turns out, you get used to it pretty fast. So I like that simplicity.

bubblo2
Bubblo World main menu

My only gripe is that the sequence of levels is not quite in ascending order of difficulty. All too often, I was stuck on a level, or managed to figure it out with some effort, but the very next few levels were straightforward.

With simple gameplay, the free price tag and good range of difficulty, this game is definitely worth a try. The only negative points are the esoteric variation of difficulty and the limited number of levels (40). So the overall rating is 4 out of 5.

Download bubblo world from the Zune marketplace here.

By Sushovan De

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