Smiley Blaster Review

“Smile and the whole world smiles with you,” they say.

Clearly ‘they’ have never walked down a UK high street, where smiling at someone provokes reactions of confusion and fear.

Boolba Labs seems convinced of the philosophy, though. Smiley Blaster is the second in the developer’s Smiley series, which takes well-worn puzzle mechanics and replaces bland old blocks with gurning globules.

While Smiley Pops was a competent clone of match-three puzzlers like Bejeweled, Smiley Blaster is a mediocre clone of bubble pinging games like Bust-A-Move.

The principle is familiar – match clusters of coloured bubbles by shooting like-coloured bubbles into them from a cannon at the bottom of the screen. You touch and drag to aim, and can pull off satisfying banking shots off the side of the screen.

The main difference here is that the simplistic arcade puzzler gameplay has been simplified yet further. You’re given a limited number of shots to fire in order to rid the screen of bubbles, so you must try and cut some free by matching the bubbles they’re clinging to.

Not only does this represent an unnecessary dumbing down of an already dumb (but fun) concept, it almost feels broken in places.

On one or two occasions, I simply wasn’t given the appropriate colours to complete the level in the few moves I’d been allowed. I had to restart the level a couple of times until the random bubble selection gave me the right tools for the job.

At other times the game swings the other way, and you’re given exactly the right colours in perfect sequence. This removes any sense of challenge, and makes you feel like you’re simply going through the motions.