Bubble Trouble 2: Rebubbled

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Like its predecessor, Bubble Trouble 2 is an Arcade-style game released on Nintendo Switch in 2025. In this game, players control a sunglasses-wearing character shooting bouncing bubbles and trying to keep from hitting them. In short, this is an obvious copycat of the Buster Bros. games. However, as I often say, there’s nothing wrong with a copycat as long as it’s a good copycat, so the question here is whether this game is a good copycat.

If you look at my review of the prior game, you’ll see that my answer to this question for the first game was “absolutely not”, and I came to this sequel without much hope that the story would be any different here. However, to my surprise, I found this to be an improvement in some ways. That said, the game is overall very similar, so I’ll be reusing the text from my review of the first game here and changing it where appropriate.

The presentation in Bubble Trouble 2 is not great. This game’s 2D visuals look like they were made in Microsoft Paint backed by generic abstract Windows wallpaper, the character designs are ugly (though the animation is decent), there’s no music, and the sound effects seem like something someone got out of an asset pack from two decades ago. Yikes.

The stiff controls from the original game are gone here, thankfully. However, that’s not to say that what’s here is great. This game has an issue that it often detects one button press as multiple, meaning that if you have multiple attacks the game might waste both one after the other, and you’ll need to wait for them to resolve before using them again. In other words, we’ve traded one control issue for another, though at the very least this control issue isn’t quite as bad.

Beyond the controls, there are other issues. As with the Buster Bros. games, you’re breaking bouncing bubbles into smaller bouncing bubbles, eventually eliminating them. However, at their smallest size, these bubbles bounce extremely low, giving you very little clearance to walk under them. Along with the poor controls, this leaves very little room for error since you’ll have little time to walk under and shoot them before they hit you and you lose a life. There’s also a very stingy timer on each of the game’s levels, forcing you to rush in a way that seems like there’s often little margin for error.

There is one other change here that’s nice to see, and that’s the addition of an endless mode, Staying Alive. It still has all the problems of the main level-based game, but it’s a nice addition all the same.

Overall, Bubble Trouble 2 is an improvement over the terrible first game, but it’s still not a very good Buster Bros. copycat. It still has control issues (though different ones this time), game design issues, and presentation issues. And once again I will note that you can get a much better take on this same formula for just a few bucks more by getting The Bug Butcher. With other alternatives like this, there’s no good reason to waste your time and money on this terrible game.

tl;dr – Bubble Trouble 2 is an Arcade-style game in the style of the Buster Bros. games, with players controlling a character shooting bouncing bubbles while avoiding them. Unfortunately, this is a poor take on this style of game, with control issues, poor game design, and an ugly presentation. You have much better alternatives to this game on Nintendo Switch, and I strongly recommend you look into one of those instead.

Grade: D

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