Those little dragons are at it again, using their confounded machine to shoot bubbles and bust bubbles all over the place. Who knows for sure what game this is in the series, which came into existence after their Bubble Bobble phase, but one thing is for sure, and that is that this is the first time the Bust-a-Move dragons have ever appeared on the Wii. Is the bubble popping fun just as good as it used to be?

Since there is no story mode for the game, we're going to switch this review up and skip that section and go straight to the gameplay. The gameplay is the same as it has always been, but incase you've never experienced it before, we'll sum it up for you. You play as one of the Bubble Bobble dragons (or other character depending) who has a machine that shoots bubbles up towards the top of the screen. The level is a cascading grouping of multiple colored bubbles, which are constantly working their way down towards where you are, and if a bubble should cross your threshold line, then you'd lose. So how do you prevent that from happening? Like many puzzle games, the idea is to shoot bubbles from where you are at the bottom, and connect them to groups of the same color, matching up batches of three so all those bubbles will pop and eliminate themselves from the board. However, you don't have to eliminate all the bubbles one at a time, because if you are good enough to separate the whole group from the point they are hanging from, it is possible to clear some levels with just one match.

You'll have some help in your bubble popping ways, as several different powerup bubbles will appear sporadically, both as spaceships that fly across the screen in zigzag patterns, as well as some that will be loaded into your ammo inventory. The different bubbles include slip bubbles (when activated bubbles will slide into place instead of sticking where they hit); bomb bubbles (ignite the area they touch and destroy them); rainbow bubbles (transforms into the color they end up touching); metal bubbles (destroy everything they come in contact with after you've shot them); and star bubbles (destroys all the same colored bubbles as the one it ends up touching).

There are several modes at play, though the gameplay is pretty much the exact same from beginning to end. You have Puzzle Mode, where you can partake in 500 different individual levels with various obstacles in your way that changes the play of the board, such as having gigantic bubbles in a relatively close place or even a wider board than usual, featuring even more bubbles than usual. Scattered throughout these puzzles are minigames where you'll point your remote at the screen as if it was a gun, and you'll use it to shoot colored bubbles, chaining several together at one time, and occasionally you'll have to switch colors on the fly in order to eliminate those as well. You'll also find this minigame as its own special mode called Shooting Mode. You've also got the Endless Mode where bubbles continue to move towards the bottom of the screen, and you can keep going as long as they don't cross the red line at the bottom.

The final mode in question is the Versus Mode. The Versus Mode used to be one of the best moves the Bust-a-Move games had, but here it seems mostly like a throwaway game mode. Instead of a tug of war game where bubbles are removed from your side of the screen and go to your opponent's side, and whoever has the bubbles go to the bottom loses, here all you do is try to earn the most jewel bubbles, which isn't all that hot of a gameplay mechanic. You can have up to eight players playing this mode, so it's the only multiplayer portion of the game, but you and your friends might find the mode not so much fun to play. And if you don't have friends, you can play against CPU controlled characters, but that doesn't affect the gameplay fun any at all.

Another problem is the control style which is the reason you should be buying it for the Wii, in which you point the remote to the left to make your ball shooter point to the left, and point to the right to shoot to the right. The problem with this control style is that the sensitivity is through the roof, meaning it is hard to line your shots up really well, meaning you'll be wasting bubbles and screwing up your screen rather than eliminating the bubbles from the level like you should be doing. You can use a Classic Controller to play with, but you'll have to buy a whole new controller just to use it, and do you really want to use a standard controller when you bought the Wii for the motion controls?

The graphics look nice enough, but the Wii is able to do a lot more than this. Having played the series before over different systems, I can't see any difference between the Wii and any other past consoles I've played the Bust-a-Move series on before. As for the sound, the bubbles popping work well enough, but frankly there just isn't enough sound to really grab you and pull you into this world. The music is particularly dreadful as well, as the same ditty plays itself over and over and it burrows inside your head until it drives you crazy.

One wishes they could talk more about Bust-a-Move Bash, but the fact is that this is literally all the game is. The gameplay isn't deep. The modes aren't really that different than one another. And the game doesn't look or sound as good as it should considering this is a next generation system we are talking about here. Plus, the controls are busted, making aiming (the core mechanic behind the whole game) a chore and episode in frustration. There is some fun to be had at times, but the game is mostly mediocrity perfectly defined.

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