Bubble Bobble Double Shot Review

Written by: Alec Hilton Posted: 28th April 2008

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This arcade classic comes to the DS, but you might not want to get your hands on it.

Bubble Bobble Double Shot Details:

Goto Bubble Bobble Double Shot Game Page

	Arcade
	Nintendo DS
	Marvelous Entertainment
	Rising Star Games

Out Now

N/A

The franchise of Bubble Bobble has been around since the dawn of gaming and unfortunately it shows in this most recent update of the series. With more of an arcade game that has been pushed to the back and only played when your running out of dosh and want one last go on something.

Bubble Bobble’s story places you in charge of two brothers, Bub and Bob and their cousin, Bubu. Now this family is a family of dinosaurs, do you get the kiddie friendly vibe yet, they are visiting their grandfather when they find a map in his loft that could lead to buried treasure. So they decide that they will go on an adventure following this map, which leads them to a deserted island.

The kiddie outlook doesn’t change in the gameplay either it has no imagination, which really is a necessity for a kids game. The idea is to move around 2D levels jumping from platform to platform and shooting bubbles at strange eggcup wind-up toys. This offers no challenge at all to kids that have grown up with games nowadays, so although it may have been a good idea 15 years ago things have changed somewhat and we need better ideas. There is some slight variation in gameplay in that some eggcups have coloured stars orbiting them, the colour of the stars determines the correct member of the family to use. Each family member fires different coloured bubbles, you need to cycle through the three to select the right colour by taping the left or right shoulder buttons. The Colour of the bubbles that each dinosaur can fire is shown by the colour of his skin. Once the eggcup has been captured in a bubble it is a simple job of jumping on top of the bubble to burst it and then kill the toy inside.

There are bubbles that float around the levels at times to give your characters a quick power-up, these are obtained in the same way that you kill enemies by jumping on the top of the bubble which explodes giving you the power-up. The only time things get a bit tricky is when your trio come to a boss; these boss battles come every ten levels (and there are a hundred levels). The reason that things get tricky is not because of the fact that the bosses are at all hard but because of the fact that the game makes it ten times harder to do. Take the first boss for example; it is a strange wind-up toy bug that constantly throws out your normal enemies, which need to be defeated until a lightning power-up appears. This power-up is what you need to damage the boss, simple huh think again, the designers thought that it was a good idea but then decided that it really was too easy, so they added a time limit on how long the lightning power-up stayed on screen and that the bolt of lightning has to hit the boss in the right place, which meant that 90% of the time your power-up has faded by the time you could use it.

The best part about this game is actually dying there is a clever little mini game that allows you to get back to where you were. Basically there are two games; one is a simple bubble bursting game, where you use the stylus to burst all the bubbles on the touch screen. The other is where you need to get your dino away from a monster; this is done by tapping alternative footprints on the touch screen to make him move to an exit and freedom. These little mini games are tremendous fun and add a bit to an otherwise poor game.

So in closing, this game was designed with kids in mind but is really just a poor attempt to revive a series that died out a long time ago. This is unfortunately not even worth a look in there is almost no fun to gained out of the title, shame really as kids games really do need a breath of new life.