Space Bust-A-Move (DS) Review
Posted by Jeffrey Harris on 09.01.2009
The popular and highly addictive puzzle gaming series continue with the latest installment on the DS.
Title: Space Bust-A-Move
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Lancarse, Taito
Genre: Puzzle game
Players: Single-player/multiplayer
Rated: E For Everyone
The long-running classic game series known as Bubble Bobble evolved into Bust-A-Move. The latest in the series is the new game, Space Bust-A-Move for the DS, and the popular long-running, classic puzzle gaming series featuring Bub and Bob, back once again to bust more bubbles. Bubbles will be bursted in this fun and entertaining game for the Nintendo DS.
Graphics
The graphics and basic design for Space are your basic sprite, animated, cartoony style for this series and the DS. The color palette is bright and glossy. The animated characters are well drawn and nicely defined. The designs have a very cutesy, Japanese-mascot, anime style the series has become to be known for. That said, the graphics are fairly basic and hardly super-impressive, even for the DS. This basically looks like an SNES game, not that there's anything wrong with that since DS often times is like a portable SNES to me which is fine because the SNES rocks.
Gameplay
The game features several different modes of play. You can do the single-player story mode in which Bub and Bob must help some friends they meets throughout the galaxy defeat some monster baddies and get their cosmo bubbles back. This takes Bub and Bob to different planets each which have their own sort of theme and background (Western level, toy level, undersea level, cosmic level). There's the versus mode where you can play against a friend. And there's also the Nintendo DS Wi-Fi mode where you can play against multiple friends. There's also the special extras gallery where you can unlock some new mini-games and challenges.
The basic rules of the gameplay for Bust-A-Move have stayed the same. The object of the puzzle stages is to connect three of the same color of a type of cosmo bubble. Sometimes you can erase more than three or a whole group depending on your skill. All the stages have varying degrees of difficulty. The basic gameplay and puzzle stages take place at the bottom screen, with score and level information on the top screen. The game also mixes it up with a boss level at the end of each stage. The boss battles take up both the top and bottom DS screen and require you to use your cosmo bubbles to take out both the boss's cosmo bubbles and the boss enemy as well. The boss battles add a nice little variety and challenging flavor to the game so things to get to be a little bit different. Some of the bosses took me quite a few tries to get through. You just need to sharpen your mad bubble busting skills. All together there are seven story game stages and seven bosses you must defeat in order to beat story/single-player mode.
One of the major flaws of the gameplay is if you die at a sub-level for a particular stage, you have to start the stage all over again which gets a little annoying. While Bust-A-Move DS utilized the DS's unique, stylus controls and capabilities, Space Bust-A-Move does away with it completely. The stylus is not used at all in the controls of this game surprisingly enough. While sometimes I find stylus play to be a mixed bag, I think they could've figured out some creative, new uses for it here. It seems odd to make a new DS Bust-A-Move game and not have anything to do with the stylus at all.
Sound
Nothing jaw dropping or amazing, but its got a nice little retro-hand held electronic soundtrack to it. However, the cutesy noises of Bub, Bob, and their critter buddies left me wanting to put the sound on mute quite often.
Lasting Appeal
The game provides some replay value and new challenges in the extra mini-games. There's the endless challenge where you try to earn a high points ranking. You are given the challenge of an endless cosmo bubble elimination stage where players have to rack up and bust as many cosmo bubbles as they can before they die. Similar to an endless Tetris/high score challenge.
There's the limited bubble challenge where you must beat a stage using just a set amount of cosmo bubbles. There's the all in one bust a move challenge, where you must beat a stage when being armed with only one bubble per level. After collecting enough bubble tokens you can buy new bubble shooters. The extra stages also let give you new avatar characters featured rather than just Bub or Bob, basically the new characters you encounter and befriend throughout the stages of single-player mode. Their selection in the stages appears to be totally random though.
Fun Factor
This is not a super, amazingly hard and ridiculously challenging game but it is very fun and easy to get into. This is a puzzle game series you can pick up and play. Though you might find some of the levels and extra mini-games particularly more challenging than others. There will always be a market for these types of puzzle games and game series like Tetris.
Graphics
7.5
The graphics are nicely drawn, sharp, and colorful but also fairly basic.
Gameplay
8.5
Fun, engaging, and easily addictive gameplay. Having to start over instead of where you left off on certain stages is massively frustrating though.
Sound
7.0
A basic and fun soundtrack with some fairly annoying critter sound FX.
Lasting Appeal
8.0
There are a lot of good unlockable stages and extras for you to choose from to give you a consistent amount of replay value.
Fun Factor
8.0
This is a very fun game and game series that's always fun to play and very easy to get into.
