Another new game in a classic franchise that doesn't quite live up to expectations.
While I usually enjoy playing puzzle games, I didn't think much of this new installment in the Bust-A-Move series. The game features graphics on par with other big name DS games. It has a decent sound track and it even has an online, Wi-Fi multiplayer option. The one thing that is missing here is addictive gameplay. Matching three or more bubbles gets monotonous, especially when the mechanism used to place the bubbles is so slow. What is a puzzle game without addictive gameplay? I would say it is pointless.
The game has the same generic story that has been used over and over again; the galaxy is in trouble and you are the only one that can help. In this case, in order to save the galaxy, you must free special “Cosmo” bubbles. Not very intriguing, but then again who plays a puzzle game for its story? A unique story is not expected and in this case it isn't really delivered. The point of the story in most puzzle games is just to facilitate different back drops for each of the levels to give you the illusion that each level is unique; when in fact they are all pretty much the same.
In this game, you go from world to world trying to collect the special bubbles that are scattered there. Once you free the special bubbles by popping the surrounding bubbles, you get credits to purchase items in the shop (you get credits every time you beat a board also). The shop items that you can buy consist of mostly useless items, such as different colors of bubbles. A shop, in most games, is supposed to help you on your journey by selling you things that you need. Or a shop can give you incentive to keep playing by selling you things to collect that make the game more interesting or easier to play. In this case the shop did not do either of these things rendering it unhelpful.
As I mentioned in the introduction, the game is played by getting a group of three or more bubbles together to pop them. This is accomplished by shooting bubbles up to the stationary bubbles in the level using a bubble gun. The gun is aimed using the control pad and the A button fires the bubbles. When the bubbles are shot, they will travel up and stick to the first stationary bubble the shot bubble brushes against. As time progress the stationary bubbles move slowly downward and the game is over if the slowly lowering bubbles touch the ground. To clear a level you must remove all the bubbles (existing stationary and shot) from the board. The bubbles can be either popped by matching three or more or by making them fall. To help to explain this second option, try to think of the bubbles on the board as being a branch of a tree. The end of the branch is held up by the base part of the branch. To make the end of the branch bubbles fall, you must pop the bubbles at the base of the branch. All special bubbles must be removed in this way. If you pop them by arranging three together, including the special bubble, the special bubble will pop and you don't get credit for releasing the special bubble. The special bubble will reappear again but only on subsequent re-plays of the level.
There are a couple of types of bubbles; standard bubbles that you try to match to pop and specialty bubbles. The specialty bubbles have various effects, such as, burning surrounding bubbles or popping all of the bubbles in the horizontal line where the specialty bubble landed. As you might expect, you have no control over which type of bubble will come up next for you to play.
Space Bust-A-Move could have been improved in many ways. One way would have been to allow the player to shoot bubbles as fast as they wanted to. Currently, the bubbles can only be shot once the previously shot bubble has landed. I imagine that the developers didn't want to allow the user to shoot bubbles really fast because they would then have to program more physics into the game to support the case when two or more shot bubbles would bump into each other. They could have, however, made the bubbles move very fast to eliminate the wait until the next bubble could be shot. Another thing they could have done differently would have been to leave the old touch screen sling shot of the bubbles in the game. The last DS based Bust-A-Move game allowed the player to grab, aim and fling the bubble using the touch screen like a sling shot. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, they removed this mechanism.
On the plus side is the multiplayer functionality. Space Bust-A-Move supports local, as well as, online multiplayer action. The local multiplayer is accomplished with one game pack allowing up to four players to compete against each other with only one game pack. The game also supports play over the internet using Wi-Fi. While this can be a cool feature, it can also be a little frustrating as the game seems to slow down even further in this mode. I am not sure if it is because of network traffic or if the game just tries to compensate for lag by anticipating it, but it inevitably slows down an already tediously slow game.
Neither helping nor hurting the game are the graphics and the music. The graphics are simplistic, as are most games on the DS. The same can be said about the music as well.
In the end, what traditionally wins over a crowd of prodigious puzzle solvers is the gameplay and Space Bust-A-Move just doesn't deliver. Even with local and online multiplayer, the game does not give me the addictive, time sucking experience I look for in a puzzle game.
