

An in-app store sells the gold bars starting at £0.69 for 10, and rising to £34.99 for 650. Gold bars are used to buy the booster bubbles, but also to get a few more bubbles if you hit your limit on a level, and to buy more lives – you lose a life every time you fail a level. As with the other Saga games, virtual items and in-app purchases figure prominently in Bubble Witch Saga 2 – it's one of the "freemium" games that have come to dominate the mobile games industry.

Once unlocked, you get three of each for free, but if you want more, you'll have to spend gold bars.

Here, the power-ups include a rainbow bubble that will match with any colour, and a fire bubble that blazes a path through any bubbles in its way. Just as Candy Crush Saga took its cues from a game called Bejeweled and Papa Pear Saga was heavily based on a game called Peggle, both Bubble Witch Saga games have their roots in a series of games called Puzzle Bobble and Bust-a-Move – the names varied depending on where in the world and on what device you played them.Īround that, King has wrapped a structure that is now familiar from its other Saga games: you play through levels earning one, two or three stars for your scores, with different challenges to vary the core matching gameplay, and power-ups used to get you out of tricky spots.īubble Witch Saga 2's Free the Ghost levels. You have a set number of bubbles to fire on each level.Īs with King's other games, this isn't a new form of gameplay in itself. Specifically, firing coloured bubbles from the bottom of the screen at other coloured bubbles higher up to make matches of three or more, which then disappear. Bubble Witch Saga 2 is the company's attempt to remedy those faults, slapping several layers of polish on to the core gameplay.Īnd that gameplay is… popping bubbles. "It plays great on iPads with larger screens, but you kinda had to squint on smartphones," King's games boss Tommy Palm told the Guardian last year. As you'll likely have guessed from the name, this is a sequel: the original Bubble Witch Saga was actually King's first mobile game back in July 2012, although the company has since admitted that it wasn't as fun as it could be on smartphones in particular.
