Bubble Trouble 3

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Like its predecessors, Bubble Trouble 3 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 games, you’ll see that my answer to this question for the first game was “absolutely not”, and my answer for the second game was “this is better, but also still no”. Will this third game continue the upwards trend? Well… yes and no. In any case, 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 3 is a good improvement over the first two games. This game’s 2D visuals are actually pretty decent, though nothing exceptional. However, there’s still no music, and the sound effects seem like something someone got out of a mobile games asset pack. Ugh.

When it comes to the gameplay… this doesn’t feel much different at all from the second game, which means it has all the same issues. 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.

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.

Disappointingly, the “Staying Alive” endless mode from the second game is gone here, and with this and the improved visuals being the only significant changes, the result is a game that feels like one step forward, one step back for the series.

Overall, Bubble Trouble 3 is still not a very good Buster Bros. copycat. It still has control issues, game design issues, and now fewer game modes than the previous game. 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 3 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 fewer game modes than the previous game. 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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