Fourteen-year-old iPhone game developer Robert Nay is the brain behind Bubble Ball, a free physics puzzler that hit 2 million downloads within two weeks of being available in the iTunes App Store. And for a first attempt, it’s not bad, although it can be frustrating.
We’ve seen games like this before, but Nay has done a pretty good job of making it intuitive, simple and challenging. Each puzzle has a ball on one end, and a goal on the other. There are platforms and objects scattered between, but you’ll need to use a few extra objects, like planks and ramps, to complete the path. You only have access to the objects given, so you have to make do with what you have. If you’ve played games like Finger Physics: Thumb Wars, you know the drill here.
Nay has also included a couple of cool additions, like the ability to change gravity or slow the ball as it moves through different areas of the puzzle. You can position those area effects around the puzzle, as well, and while it adds interesting difficulty to the puzzles, the changes don’t always work extremely well.
Bubble Ball is a decent physics puzzler, especially for its price tag, and it includes 21 levels, some of which can be challenging, at least at first. Like many iPhone puzzlers of the same genre, though, it can be frustrating. Positioning objects is a tedious affair, and most of the difficulty you’ll have with any given level comes from trying to get the pieces in the right places.
All told, Bubble Ball is free, competent and something to do — all of which weigh in its favor. It’s a simple game with simple controls and puzzles that are all pretty easily solvable once you’ve got an understanding of how it plays. For Nay’s first outing, Bubble Ball is fairly impressive. It’s not the best physics puzzler ever made, but again, getting a game free pushes it a long way.
