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5.3 mid-normal
Hi guys, it's Uesugi. I made a promise to someone special that I wouldn't write any more game reviews until I found Ringil in Angband. As you know I always keep my promises if someone special is involved. (Except for pets, since I don't believe promises to pets count.) And guess what? I was staying in a cheap Beijing hotel with huge smelly wardrobes playing on my laptop and a master vampire dropped Ringil as I was clearing up a deep dungeon level. What luck! I also found boots of speed (+10) at 400 feet. So now I can review games again.
Bumble Tales, from Tandem Games, is a match-3 game about the whimsical town of Springleton, Ohio. Actually, I'm not sure where Springleton is located - perhaps in an alien universe since most people look like green versions of those round-bottomed punching toys that refuse to go down no matter how many times you punch them. I think these characters are called "bumbles," but don't quote me on that. As you play through the many match-3 levels, you unlock town buildings and townspeople (and pets), each with a slightly amusing biography that is narrated on their character's scrapbook page.
So in short, it's a trophy collection game.
Like all match-3 games, you're given a game board filled with various tiles, with the goal of swapping two adjacent tiles and making a match of three similar ones in a row. The three in a row will vanish from the board, allowing tiles above to drop in from the top, and your score will increase. New tiles will also be generated to insure the board is always filled. If matches happen to result from tiles falling - either by accident or your strategic cunning - these count as combos (or chains) and are also cleared. The player swaps tiles either by clicking on the two tiles he or she wants to exchange, or by holding down the mouse button on the first tile and sliding it toward the tile it's to be swapped with. See Bejeweled or Big Kahuna Reef.
Gameplay in Bumble Tales is all about gathering resources. You have six valuable resources to collect and every tile cleared from the board increments the resource ingraved on its surface. These are bricks, logs, leaves, crystals, gold, and pink diamonds. Why are leaves needed to build a town, and just how hard is it to gather leaves anyway? This is the question you'll be asking yourself as you play Bumble Tales. (Hint: unlock Matches the dog as soon as you can because he gives you a bonus leaf for every match you make - and you'll need those leaves!) Collect the required resources for each level and it's on to the next. It starts out easy and gets slightly less easy as you uncover more of the town!
You use your resources to purchase buildings as you construct the town of Springleton. Buildings like the Town Hall, the Tennis Courts, the Green House, the Police Station, etc. Each building has a special powerup that can be used to make your matching quest easier. The Green House, for example, removes all the leaf tiles from the game board. Very handy! The Tennis Courts remove a horizontal line of tiles. Okay! The Town Hall "rotates the board for more moves." Wait, what? Well, as long as the rotation isn't in 90 degree chunks I guess that would increase the number of moves - otherwise wouldn't the number of available matches remain the same under the new orientation? (I did once get an amusing "message from management" that there were no more available moves and a new board was being generated.) Every time you use a powerup, you must wait a certain amount of time before it becomes available again. You can spend your resources on building upgrades - two per building - that decrease the time limit between powerup uses.
The really useful "powerups" are townspeople, however!
There are 35 "bumbles" to unlock. You purchase them from the shop window just as you do the buildings, by spending your collected match-3 resources. Mousing over any available building or bumble in the shop will let you know just how many more resources you need to purchase it. (Usually you'll need more leaves.) Why are townspeople useful? At any time you can have one townsperson selected, and their "powerup" will affect the game board in some way. For example, Zee Zee the cat will give you an extra gold resource for every match. If you're running low on a certain type of resource, selecting the right townsperson can make gathering that resource much easier. And townspeople can be upgraded twice, increasing their powerup affects and unlocking more of their biography... which appears to be the goal of the game.
The usual match-3 mechanics like special game tiles are present. Question mark tiles sometimes appear on the board and can be matched with anything. "M" tiles can be matched with other "M" tiles and increment whichever resources you need most. (I'm not sure what the "M" stands for, perhaps the classic Atari arcade hit Marble Madness?)
The graphics in Bumble Tales are pleasant and engaging, though extremely static. There are lots of great bumble character designs but little, if any, animation (not counting the game board). Sounds are particularly well-done, with individual character voices congratulating you on chain-reaction matches. The sushi chef sometimes uses Japanese, the cat meows and yowls, and the town bookworm occasionally busts out something nerdy like "triple point one four." (She's referring to pi.) I found the mouse control to be sometimes jerky and not quite as smoothly responsive as I generally like my match-3 games. I never did work out if it was possible to continue making matches while other tiles are dropping or combos are taking place due to the slight stuttering of the controls.