Bust-a-Move 4 (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.8 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Greg Kasavin
• Reviewed on: 02/04/2000
• Updated on: 06/26/2000
• Released on: 01/31/2000
• Originally published on GameSpot: Bust-a-Move 4 (PC) Review

Bust-A-Move 4 is an action-packed Japanese puzzle game that requires quick thinking and a lot of coordination as you work to combine groups of colored bubbles to rack up points and move on to the next level in a dizzying array of colorful, challenging stages. It's a simple-looking game, but its graphics and gameplay are actually very engaging, just as its play mechanics have turned out to be quite original.

You can tell Bust-A-Move 4 was originally a video game. The pixelated menu text, the primary colors, the conspicuous lack of mouse support, and the hand-drawn animation all lend the game a sense of early-'90s arcade antiquity. That's understandable, considering Bust-A-Move 4 is a straight port of the Japanese arcade game Puzzle Bobble 4. But once you get past the initial shock that you're essentially playing an emulated arcade game on your PC, you'll find that Bust-A-Move 4 actually looks quite charming. The game's cute, colorful characters have the same sort of appeal that makes Pokémon so popular, while their little bubble-firing catapult machines look like something out of a Da Vinci sketchbook. And the bubbles themselves are all brightly colored and they even vary in style on different levels.

Bust-A-Move 4 looks clean, simple, and attractive, but strangely enough the game actually suffers from slowdown from time to time, even on computers much faster than its low system requirement. The problem goes away if you play in low-resolution mode, which makes the bubbles lose a lot of their geometric appeal as they're reduced from spheres to pixelated blobs. The resolution switch only seems to affect the look of the bubbles, as everything else about the game, including its very silly animated story-mode sequences, defaults to a low resolution that won't leave you with much of a first impression. The game's decidedly bubbly soundtrack might also rub you the wrong way at first, but just like all the wacky character speech (most of which is in Japanese), it'll probably grow on you soon enough.

That's partly because the game itself is a lot of fun to play. It's not very different from previous Bust-A-Move games if you've ever played them; your goal in the single-player mode is still to clear a screen of colored bubbles by matching colors in groups of three bubbles or more, which causes the group to pop. All the bubbles you're trying to get rid of gradually shift down, which forces you to act quickly, because if the bubbles reach the bottom of the screen, you lose. Bust-A-Move is best described as a combination of billiards and Tetris; you'll need a good eye and mathematical precision to bank a bubble off the wall and around to the other side. The game has adjustable difficulty settings and lots of different levels and styles, most of which are enjoyable and addicting and can keep you entertained both during quick breaks and long stretches of time.

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