Bebbled Android App Review
Bebbled is a puzzle game that is far, far more difficult than it at first seems. It’s also good and well thought out game that is fairly addictive and a great way to kill a bit of time waiting for the bus. Today we look at this app on our Android 1.5 MID using the Rockchip RK2808 chip. Let’s get the bebs rolling.
The Skinny
The goal of the game is simply to match the coloured orbs and then break them once they are in groups of 3 or more. The larger the group the more points you get. It’s simple really. It’s just a breaker game. You could spend hours and hours playing in one of the two campaigns available, with 18 and 15 levels respectively giving you a total of 33 levels of potential fun-time-wasting. There is also a freestyle mode where you can customize the settings of the game (for example, how quickly the game throws more bebs – those coloured orbs – onto the top of your pile). The replay value offered here is pretty immense if you’re into these kind of games, but what puts it a notch above is the online mode where you can challenge people from across the globe to see who can get the highest score.
One knock on the game, though, is the lack of gameplay goals that deviate from your standard “Score at least 200 points to pass this level” model. Starting the “XMas Campaign” looked extremely promising as my task was to clear all the orbs from the screen which had been strategically placed so they had to be cleared in a specific order. That was good fun. That only lasted for 1 level and by the time I got to level 5 that mode still hadn’t made a reappearance, which was a little disappointing.
Of Note
An interesting gameplay mechanic is a small button that flips the board/screen, and the bebs (orbs) fall up or down as if gravity had reversed. This can have extreme strategic importance, I imagine, but I didn’t unlock the full tactical usefullness of this feature simply because figuring out when to reverse gravity to achieve the biggest groups of orbs to break went beyond my mental interest in acheiving a higher score in the game.
Parting Words
If anything, Bebbled is a game like Sudoku – you have those who absolutely need to fill in every number correctly, and you have those who just enjoy the ride while killing a bit of time. The hardcore breaker-game fans will no doubt find this game to be a deliciously challenging delight, and will strive to strategise to the fullest extent. The rest of the people, like me, will enjoy the game for what it initially offers: a great puzzle game that’s not too easy, is colourful, sports funny music and is just generally fun to play for short spurts of time.
Some Photographs
For those of you who have braved this review thus far, and are interested in seeing how this game looks in a 7-inch Android MID screen, then look no further than right below! Click the images to enlarge them.
Plan your beb-breaking strategies on our forums!
Note #1: On our RK2808 7-inch MID, the game ran perfectly fine. The chip handled the animations with ease and breaking the groups never once lagged or became choppy. If anything, the only sign that this processor struggled was during the initial loading of the game, but of course that sort of thing is forgiven. The game loads fairly quickly anyways and is not inconvenient.
Note #2: Our RK2808 MID did not have a back button. This was infuriating when trying to change game modes in-game. We had to exit, kill the process, then restart it. Much grumbling ensued.
Categories: Android, App Review, Review
