Review: (Maya) Bubbles Touch
Score:
74%
One of my wife's favourite games ever was Frozen Bubble, the infamous bubble shooter that worked so well on the S60 phones of yesteryear. Which made Maya Bubbles Touch an interesting review subject - how would it measure up to the rightly famous previous classic of the genre? Pretty well, with the caveat that there's a definite twist in the gameplay. Read on...
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Hyperkani, of course, are no strangers to Symbian gaming, producing a range of casual (native) Symbian titles. Maya Bubbles Touch (curiously with the 'Maya' bit missed out of the app title on the Ovi Store itself) is available in ad-sponsored free and commercial versions, so take your pick. At £3, it's a tiny bit high for such a casual game, but then if you find yourself addicted.... For everyone else just grab the free version and accept the odd bit of a data hit while ads are loaded.
The premise will be very familiar - patterns of coloured bubbles, into which you have to fire bubbles from your gun - create blocks of three or more bubbles and they fall. To aid you in this, you have extra 'bomb' bubbles which explode anything they touch and 'rainbow' bubbles, which take the colour of the first thing they touch. So far so good, eh?
The gameplay pitch in Frozen Bubble was that the ceiling was gradually advancing within each level, giving a time pressure to clear all the bubbles in that level before the patterns reached the ground/deck. The twist here is that there's no time pressure whatsoever - Maya Bubbles Touch is very much a puzzle game first and an arcade game second.
Here, the catch is that you don't get an infinite supply of bubbles to shoot. Instead, the bubbles that fall in the course of the game make up your supply - so the more efficient you can be, in terms of arranging long matching patterns (and patterns that hold other balls in place - zap the top patterns and watch the 'hanging' bubbles fall, etc.), the more bubbles you'll have in hand, ready to attack more demanding future levels. This then carries on until you finally, at some point, run out of bubbles.
A further twist for touchscreen Symbian phones, and rather tying into being a puzzle more than an arcade game, is that the usual 'aim a bubble gun' system has been axed in favour of simply tapping the point you want each bubble to travel to. This sounds as though it might make the game too easy, but in practise it just eliminates the frustrations of getting the aim slightly wrong on a tricky shot and having to live with bubbles in the wrong places for a while. Purists will say that this was half the fun of the bubble shooting genre, but I think the touch-only system works rather well in practice. And you still get to do fancy 'bounces' off the sides of the playing arena in order to reach specific target bubbles.
Maya Bubbles Touch is an interesting variant on the genre and is certainly nicely presented - the Mayan artwork looks authentic and is different for every level. Sound effects are present but sparse - just in the titles and when running out of bubbles, as a warning - it would have been nice to have the option of sound effects to accompany pattern matches, especially those of a particularly long size.
I was impressed by Hyperkani's attention to detail in that you don't have to start from scratch, should you have turned off your phone or had the game close for some other reason - you're always given the option to carry on from the last point you got to - meaning that you can happily play a long game over the course of a week and never lose your way. Nicely done.
Which is not to say there isn't room for improvement - the high score and instructions screens are very barebones and could do with a huge facelift, plus a degree of Internet-hosted high score comparison would have been interesting.
As a casual game, Maya Bubbles Touch is just about perfect - and if you get distracted on your commute by a conversation or tube train change, you won't lose the game because the game will patiently wait for your next touch.
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 28 June 2011
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at