{"id":21667,"date":"2021-10-29T00:01:27","date_gmt":"2021-10-29T00:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=21667"},"modified":"2021-10-21T01:19:41","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T01:19:41","slug":"puzzle-bobble-3d-vacation-odyssey-ps4-ps5-psvr-oculus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/29\/puzzle-bobble-3d-vacation-odyssey-ps4-ps5-psvr-oculus\/","title":{"rendered":"Puzzle Bobble 3D: Vacation Odyssey (PS4, PS5, PSVR, Oculus)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I freaking love Bubble Bobble.\u00a0 And its spinoff puzzle games, Puzzle Bobble, is one of my top three favorite puzzle game series of all time alongside Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo and just plain ol\u2019 Tetris.\u00a0 Puzzle Bobble is also sometimes called Bust-A-Move, by the way.\u00a0 Anyway, I was really curious when I found out there was a 3-D version of Puzzle Bobble coming out, and even more excited that I got to review it!\u00a0 Puzzle Bobble 3D: Vacation Odyssey has a VR component, too, so you can play it on PSVR or Oculus.\u00a0 But you don\u2019t HAVE to have VR to enjoy it either, so it\u2019s also playable on regular current PlayStation consoles (reviewed on PS4 here).<\/p>\n

Gameplay is very similar to the 2-D Puzzle Bobble games, in that you fire colored bubbles at a cluster of them, and if you match three of the same kind, they\u2019ll disappear.\u00a0 When you shoot a bubble at the cluster, the force will make the bubbles spin around so the cluster will be facing you from a different angle.\u00a0 When you clear enough bubbles to reveal the core at the center, fire one last bubble when it starts glowing to complete the stage.\u00a0 Your other dinosaur friend holds the next bubble to throw to you after you fire, but you can also switch out bubbles if you need that color instead.<\/p>\n

There are three main modes of play.\u00a0 In Story Mode, bubble dragons Bub and Bob have taken their girlfriends on a vacation, but the bad guy in these games traps them in bubbles so now Bub and Bob have to rescue them.\u00a0 As if you need a story for an excuse to pop colored bubbles.\u00a0 Anyway, here you\u2019ll tackle 100 different levels, and earn stars and coins for completing them.\u00a0 In some levels you must complete the stage with a certain number of bubbles, while in other stages you just have a time limit to finish.\u00a0 Stages will also introduce new types of bubbles that have various effects when popped, some good, some bad.\u00a0 Completed stages will earn you stars and coins, which you can use to buy power-ups like bombs to help you clear out bubbles.\u00a0 But it takes an awful lot of coins to buy power-ups.<\/p>\n

The other two modes include a two-player Duel mode, but you can only play it online.\u00a0 I wish they would\u2019ve implemented a split screen format so you can play it locally as well.\u00a0 The last mode is Endless, where you must quickly clear out clusters of bubbles before they rise to the top and get sucked in by a vortex.\u00a0 You can also play this game with VR, so it looks like you\u2019re seeing what Bub sees.\u00a0 Sounds like something that would be on my bucket list, but since I don\u2019t have VR, I wasn\u2019t able to try this out.<\/p>\n

Aside from it taking too many coins to buy power-ups, and the difficulty imbalance in Story Mode, the only other problem I had with the game is it seems to focus more on gimmicks than actual gameplay.\u00a0 In the 2-D games, you had to use strategy to ricochet bubbles off walls to get them in hard to reach spaces, but there\u2019s none of that here.\u00a0 I still liked the game, simply because I\u2019m such a big fan of the series, but it\u2019s not any better than the 2-D ones.\u00a0 There is one minor detail that I did appreciate, though, and that\u2019s the fact they are calling it Puzzle Bobble and not Bust-A-Move.\u00a0 I never liked that name.\u00a0 Puzzle Bobble just makes more sense!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nothing violent or objectionable here.\u00a0 There is a silly Easter egg type gag where you can fire the bubbles at Bob and hit him, and he\u2019ll get mad and kick the bubble back at you (you even get a trophy for that), but that\u2019s about as violent as it gets.\u00a0 Reading skill is helpful for the text, but not necessary just to play.\u00a0 Puzzle Bobble 3D: Vacation Odyssey is rated E for Everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I freaking love Bubble Bobble.\u00a0 And its spinoff puzzle games, Puzzle Bobble, is one of my top three favorite puzzle game series of all time alongside Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo and just plain ol\u2019 Tetris.\u00a0 Puzzle Bobble is also sometimes called Bust-A-Move, by the way.\u00a0 Anyway, I was really curious when I found out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21663,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21667"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21715,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21667\/revisions\/21715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}