Soul Bubbles review (DS)

When a game opens with the statement that it does not include licence racing cars, post apocalyptic soldiers, elfs orcs and magicians, or gang fights it’s a pretty safe bet it’s going to be something a little bit different from the norm. And that is certainly the case with Soul Bubbles, and yet it isn’t, although the end result is something different, many of the elements that make up the whole have been seen before. But that’s by no means a bad thing, plenty of games have been highly derivative over the years and still been good games, and Soul Bubbles follows that trend.

Blowing Bubbles

The games plot is nothing too complex, it’s something we’ve seen plenty of times, rescue the souls, collect objects and save the day, certainly nothing grounbreaking there. But it’s all presented very nicely, as a trainee spirit herder you are under the tutelage of one of your seniors, a bearded old man who pops up from time to time to offer advice and guidance by way of small cut scenes.

These appear mainly towards the beginning of the game, where he leads you through a tutorial, and then teaches you the powers of the masks, hmmm now where have I seen that before? Once you get deeper in to the game though the interruptions from your master get less frequent leaving you to concentrate on the gameplay. At it’s heart Soul Bubbles is mainly a maze game, each level is a maze that you have to guide your spirits through whilst keeping them safe from the many hazards along the way. To do this you have to encase them in a bubble and blow it through the mazes using your stylus.

Elemental

The whole blowing bubbles thing is very much like the recent Wiiware release Lost Winds in a lot of aspects, the main similarity is the use of wind to move your objective, but there’s a lo more to it than that.. Like Lost Winds fire and water come in to the equation, but in a different way, you get more direct control of the elements in Soul Bubbles than Lost Winds. Rather than just blowing the elements around as you do in Lost Winds here your powers allow you to draw bubbles, trapping water to drop on the fiery obstacles you face.

You get quite a range of abilities at your fingers really, and the game has quite a sophisticated physics system or a game of this type. You are able to do a lot with your bubbles, not just blow them around or create new ones. You can also cut them up, to squeeze them through small gaps, and obviously rejoin them too, when you need a larger mass to open doors. It’s all very simple really, but requires a good deal of thought too, you can breeze through a lot of the early levels without any real trouble, but you’ll need to put in plenty of thought if you want to pick up the required collectibles to advance.

Puzzling

It’s the puzzle elements that really make the game though, otherwise it’d be quite a bog standard maze game, but the way it makes your brain work to progress stops things from getting boring. The puzzle elements are brought in slowly to start with, but after a while you’ll come across seemingly unreachable collectibles, sometimes you’ll find a way to reach them, other times you’ll have to be patient, and wait to discover the method to reach them in later levels.

This gives the game a fair bit of replayability, especially for the completists, as you’ll often finish a level without collecting everything, a lot of the time you won’t even notice that you missed something till the end. So you can always go back and replay those levels to pick up the extras you need to advance in the game. Puzzle games are always great for handhelds, and Soul Bubbles is no exception to this, the levels, though getting quite complex towards the end, are pretty much of a perfect length for a bus journey And the levels are split up in to nicely themed worlds, each with it’s own set of puzzles, and nicely represented backdrop.

Nobody’s perfect

Whilst Soul Bubbles is a great little puzzle game, it’s not without it’s faults, or should I say niggles really, as they’re nothing too major. Most serious of these is the control scheme, whilst the stylus works perfectly for blowing your bubble around, when it comes to using the special powers, cutting, creating new bubbles, etc, it can be a bi fiddly. This is more of a fault in the hardware though as it’s the size of the D pad, which you must press different directions on to access your powers., it’s far too easy to use the wrong power by mistake, and it can be a bit frustrating when you’re in a position where timing is crucial.

Left-handed players need not concern themselves with this problem though, as they get to use the DS’s face buttons to use their powers instead, makes a change the minority getting a better control scheme, doesn’t it? Another minor niggle is the games graphics, while they are beautiful and suit the game perfectly, sometimes it can be a little unclear if some of the scenery is just there for show, or is an actual obstacle to be navigated. This is easily overcome through trial and error though, and by the time you’ve finished the first level in a world you’ll know what is what.

Sell your Soul?

If you like your puzzle games then Soul Bubbles is well worth a purchase, it’s fun, well structured, and whilst it does have a couple of very minor faults, is a very compulsive game that you’ll want o keep picking up until you’ve completed it. For anyone else I’d still say it’s worth a look, as it’s one of the more action based puzzlers it may well be more appealing to a wider audience than some puzzle games.