iPhone Game Review: Bubble Shuffle
Bubble Shuffle, from Handmark Games, is a cute word puzzle game that's simple enough for children to play but advanced enough to provide a decent challenge to adults too.
The premise is simple: find as many words as you can from a set of letters (enclosed in bubbles, naturally) to advance to the next round.
There are four different games. Shuffle Rush requires you to find at least one word using all the letters before you can advance. There's a time limit, but finding other words adds a few seconds to the clock. Shuffle Puzzle is much the same but there's no timer.
In Fast Finder you have to find a certain proportion of the words in the given time, while Discovery is the same but without the timer.
Various "awards" are given out for finding all the words in a given round, for avoiding shuffling the bubbles around, for finding interesting words, and so on. They don't serve much purpose except as colourful proof that you've done quite well at the game.
The whole game is pretty cute, with Wordsworth the fish guiding you through everything you need to do. The music gets a little tiresome after a while, but thankfully you can turn that off.
Due to the size of the iPhone's screen, some rounds with either a lot of words or a lot of letters can be quite difficult to read and manipulate. It would have been nice to have the option to play in landscape mode as well.
There's a high score system which stores local scores for each type of game. It would have been nice to have a global table, as is the case with many other games, and it becomes a little annoying having to type the same name in every time you complete a game -- some kind of account system would have made that aspect slicker.
More importantly, the word dictionary doesn't appear to be very large. That is, the same letters come up quite often which means if you play the game a lot you'll soon recognise the long words. Ironically, the actual dictionary seems quite large and you'll have to find some fairly obscure words in order to fully complete any round.
Overall, though, this is a fun diversion when you fancy a light-hearted word-finding puzzle game. At only 59p ($0.99) it's a bargain.
Bubble Shuffle [iTunes store link]
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