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Home: Boov Pop (iOS/Android) game review

We review Home: Boov Pop for iPhone, iPad and Android devices, a colour-matching puzzle game tie-in to Dreamworks’ kiddie-friendly animated movie.

Home: Boov Pop might look like a kiddie-friendly puzzler with its bright, cartoony graphics and initially low difficulty, but just a few levels in it starts to show its claws and you’ll have to carefully consider each move, or be met with a big fat bag of fail. As such, while younger kids might soon lose patience and give up, the game proves to be a worthy time sink for older gamers like ourselves.

Boov Pop’s general concept isn’t exactly revolutionary: drag your finger across balls of the same colour to pop them, with the aim of producing massive combos. Multi-coloured balls can be used to link different colours together to get super-mega-combos, while some balls will explode when popped and take out their neighbours.

However, there’s plenty of variety in gameplay thanks to the changing level objectives, with some tasking you to eliminate a set number of balls, some challenging you to reach a high score and so on. Occasionally you’ll have to rescue tiny alien creatures by popping bubbles next to them, or even take on a boss character by doing the same.

Also helping to keep things fresh is the selection of unlockable characters, each with their own special powers. For instance, the first character, Oh, can pop all balls of a certain colour once per level.

We can see kids taking to Home: Boov Pop thanks to the gorgeous and bold presentation, but after a seriously gentle dozen or so levels the difficulty does ramp up, meaning lots of lost lives if you don’t pay close attention. And while you can simply wait for your lives to regenerate, you might be tempted to throw some virtual coins at the game to give you more turns, and make levels easier to complete. And that’s where the in-app purchases come in…

To be fair, the dreaded in-app purchases aren’t too intrusive and can be ignored as long as you’ve got a little patience and don’t give up on levels too easily. And we’d happily recommend Home: Boov Pop to anyone who enjoys the likes of Bejewelled and other colour-matching puzzlers, for whiling away those commutes.

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