Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons isn’t what I was expecting, as the 1986 arcade game – Bubble Bobble – is a series of individual screens, play with Bub & Bob, as you blow bubbles and bump off the baddies who are trying to kill you.
As you blow at them, they’ll become encased within, and you have a limited time to pop the bubble to end them, otherwise they come back more angry than before.
This time round, there’s no Bob, and it’s a solo pursuit through a series of maddening levels and screens.
For the Dungeons, these are individual screens, with up to ten to be completed in order to progress. For the Sweet Dungeon, that was relatively easy. For the Jelly Dungeon, after 30 minutes of dying almost instantly, regularly, I only got through because by chance, I got 5 easy levels, then a pass to the end of the tenth 🙂
And while Sweet Castle also took a hell of a long time, for Jelly Castle?! Well, eventually I got to the first checkpoint, then only ONCE (out of 90 mins playing) did I get to the screen with the icy floor, bungled it and died. Then I couldn’t get past the previous screen again.
I tried following the method of one player on Youtube, but a load of diagonal whales can come along at random and it’s beyond frustrating.
What’s a royal pain is that there’s checkpoints only every 4 or 5 screens, and you have to make sure you DON’T DIE, otherwise it’s back to the last checkpoint. If it was per-screen, or even every one or two, that would be something, but it’s not. As things stand, while I don’t like to quit such a game, it’s just a royal pain and stops being fun.
Maybe the programmers can implement more checkpoints?? Please do that, and I’ll go back to it. It does not deserve the absolute reaming that it’s got in Steam reviews, but it just needs to fix the checkpoint system.
Additionally, I tried emailing the PR people as I submitted a request for this game two weeks before release – when the first email came through about it – but the game only came through AFTER release. If you read this, can you check your spam and email me back, please? I had sent a couple of chaser emails.
Score: Frustration/10
Thanks to our friends at TAITO CORP and Arc System Works for the review code for this game.
Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons is out now on PC/Steam.
Important info:
- Developer: TAITO CORP
- Publisher: TAITO CORP, Arc System Works
- Players: single-player
PC specs:
- CPU: AMD RYZEN 9 7950X3D
- Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E CARBON WIFI AMD X670 S AM5 DDR5 PCIe 5.0 4x M.2 2.5GbE AMD EXPO™ ATX
- RAM: 64GB (2x32GB) Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RGB PC5-44800 (5600Mhz)
- Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ 24GB GDDR6 Ray-Tracing RDNA3 6144 Streams
- 1st Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 (2280) PCIe 4.0 (x4) NVMe SSD TLC V-NAND 7450MB/s Read 6900MB/s
- 2nd Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5” SSD SATA III 6Gb/s MJX MLC V-NAND 2GB Cache Read 560MB/s Write 530MB/s 98k/88k IOPS
- 3rd Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5” SSD SATA III 6Gb/s MJX MLC V-NAND 2GB Cache Read 560MB/s Write 530MB/s 98k/88k IOPS
- 4th Storage Drive: Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB NAS 3.5″ SATA HDD/Hard Drive
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.