Bust-a-Move: Journey

The Good
Expanding from the games before it, this mobile game packs a multitude of new features adding the to series traditional gameplay. This includes new types of obstacles and bubbles which affect how every play attempt works with the random generating bubbles. The new elements are gradually introduced, island by island, which caters well for those new to Puzzle Bobble. Those new gameplay features combined with the items and stuff that you can purchase, gives the game a sort of junior career mode. A number of ways to increase the score such as reflect bonuses and popping combos, allow for different ways to play the game. Events are available for some extra challenge and there many ways to earn some coins with daily bonuses levels and login presents. What a way to encourage players to come back to the game.

So many colourful and lush graphics and colourful characters, it's hard to pick your favourite. With the monsters that you fought in Bubble Bobble now acting like proper characters, you get a sense of Puzzle Bobble world buildup. A decent amount of presentation really makes the best use of the screen's portrait orientation so everything fits neatly in your smartphone.

The Bad
No doubt you got a good look at the game's graphics and had a taste of more and more features, the further you play. But then you begin to notice that many things are terribly wrong with this game. Particularly the gameplay is unbalanced for the wrong reasons.

Purchasing items is a good way to make the game easier, but its pretty costly. This is worse than an arcade quarter munching machine, because you have to pay for virtually everything. Pay to continue, pay to undo a move, pay to use items that you NEED to get through the stage. The game gets increasingly expensive to play the further you go.

Some of the stages you play are pretty creative and test you to make use of the limited bubbles and some within a time limit. But later levels are increasingly frustrating with lesser chances of making matches and combos and giving you so few bubbles that you have no choice but to purchase stuff for a winning chance. Talk about incredibly unfair,

What makes the graphical side dwindle is that there too few backgrounds, which will repeat themselves no matter which island you go to. There are also not many music tracks that play. The worst of the tracks is the boss tune, which sounds like its making a complete mockery of the player with farm animals teasing at your every effort.

And the darkest part of the game is the touch control. Having to aim the bubble by depressing the screen with your finger and then letting go to fire means that a twitch of the finger can cause the bubble to go off aim and one stray finger can cause a bubble to misfire. Why couldn't there be a fire button at the bottom of the screen? And if you didn't notice, there is a forced pause between bubble shots so you can quickly shoot your bubbles where time is limited, particularly the bonus levels and boss levels, leading to what shouldn't be line overs. This is like crossing a turn-based combat from the player's side with a real-time enemy attack, which is truly ridiculous.

The Bottom Line
This was a really great attempt to introduce the Puzzle Bobble series to both touch screen and mobile phone devices. Control sticks seem to work much better for this sort of gameplay. However it probably wasn't quite ready for them at the time. It's a great time killer, just as much fun as popping bubble wrap and presenting a pretty picture while you play. A great pity that the awkward mechanics can really kill the fun in the process. There's just too many problems in need of fixing. Not quite the arcade experience you're looking for, but a unique one that you can take outside your home. Learn how the new mechanics work and you're good to play.