Balloon Pop Remix

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Despite its generic-sounding name, the Balloon Pop series stuck around for a while, starting out on the Wii in 2007, with entries on mobile devices and the 3DS over the years. Having not played these other games, I can’t very well say how 2012’s Balloon Pop Remix on Nintendo 3DS compares to those games, I can only talk about it in its own right.

Balloon Pop Remix is a touchscreen-controlled Match-3 Puzzle Game that’s fairly comparable to various other entries in the genre on mobile devices, but it approaches its gameplay in a unique enough way to keep things interesting. Players draw lines through two or more adjacent balloons on the screen to pop them, causing the other balloons beneath them to rise upwards. When these balloons settle into their new position, any three or more balloons of the same color that adjacent will also pop, potentially causing a chain reaction as more balloons fall into place, then more pop, and so on.

While this gameplay feels very familiar (sorta’ like a combination of the Collapse! series and the Puzzle + Dragons series), what makes this feel different is that players do not score any points or reset their constantly-draining timer with the initial balloons they pop, but only make progress with the chains of matches that fall into place afterwards. As a result, players need to determine which balloons to remove as garbage, and which to try to match for points, which gives the game some degree of strategy. Add to this various power-ups you can use to assist you, as well as different types of balloons that can help or hinder you in different ways, and you have a Puzzle game that offers a good amount of variety in its simple gameplay.

This game features A standard stage-based mode, an endless mode, and a decent puzzle mode, as well as multiple unlockable minigames that are also pretty fun in their own right. Given the simplicity of this game’s Puzzle formula and its presentation (which I’ll get to further down), this is far more than I expected here.

I suppose my biggest complaint with this game is that, much as with games like Bejeweled, the truly big chains that you end up creating don’t really feel like something you’re responsible for, but rather just you being lucky that the game’s random elements decided to give you with fresh matches falling in place of the one you just cleared intentionally. Still, even with this detachment, it’s still compelling to clear a match and then see countless other matches to fall into place.

Well, there is one other complaint I have here, and that is that the presentation is pretty terrible, featuring poorly-scrawled cartoony 2D drawings of an alien and various other objects, a silly story about said alien trying to piece together his crashed spaceship (no idea what this has to do with popping balloons though), and a whimsical soundtrack that ranges from forgettable to outright bad.

Still, despite the poor presentation and the somewhat shallow gameplay, Balloon Pop Remix is a decent Puzzle game, and for a mere $8 there’s a pretty good amount of content here. This games’t the most original entry in its genre, and it’s certainly not one of the better-looking ones, but it’s decent enough for fans of the genre who own a Nintendo 3DS to give it a look.

tl;dr – Balloon Pop Remix is a Match-3 Puzzle game that combines elements of Collapse! And Puzzle + Dragons. The result is gameplay that’s surprisingly compelling even if it is somewhat shallow, and even though the presentation is pretty terrible, the $8 price tag is pretty fair given the good amount of content here. If you’re a Puzzle game fan with a Nintendo 3DS, this game is worth a look.

Grade: B-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, Ilya Zverev, Connor Armstrong, Eli Goodman, K.H., Kristoffer Wulff, Stov, and Gabriel Coronado-Medina. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}