by Nicole Selley

Created on: September 27, 2008   Last Updated: September 29, 2008

Rating 3/5

Pop-a-Tronic by Big Blue Bubble is all about matching coloured bubbles in combos of 3 or more and to burst them with your energy needle. It is a fast moving, fun puzzle game with which you can easily fill some spare time.

Whilst being very similar to other "Tetris-type" puzzle games, Pop-a-Tronic has some additional features which makes is more challenging and exciting, even though it takes you some time to understand the tools well enough to make full use of them:

The purifier (which appears when you popped sufficient sets of combos) changes colours and clicking it at the right time means all bubbles in the same colour on your screen will be destroyed.

With the inhale feature you can suck bubbles in and spit them out in a different location, thus creating bigger combos to burst.

The color transmutation device transforms surrounding bubbles to the selected colour to create big combos and the charge bomb can clear big parts of the screen in one go if fully loaded. But be careful individual bubbles lock over time or if clicked whilst not in a combo!

Be quick to empty the screen the bubbles just keep coming and your clicking will become more and more hectic.

Well designed with a dark background and bright bubbles and an easy full screen view, the game is easy to play and looks the part, the rather monotone music however starts going on your nerves quite soon, so the mute button came in handy. The function to switch game tips on and off is useful for both beginners and experts.

In overall, the game is fun and offers different levels depending on your skills (accessible depending on the number of highscore places you hold) from marathon to puzzle, lock-up and self-destruct for more experienced players. Certainly a game that grows on you, helps you to take your mind of things and is rather easy to learn, but not too different from other puzzle games you played before. I enjoyed playing it, but wouldn't buy it without the option to vary the games further.

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