So Pop has finally made it onto the Shop Channel for us to spend our hard-earned Wii Points on. It costs 700 of them, by the way, so that's £4.90 in the good ol' UK.
I have just gone through the tutorial and had a quick go, and I am very happy.
The game is simplicity itself. There are several colours of bubbles travelling across your screen, and you have to shoot them, using either A or B.
That means this game is zapper compatible, yes guys, although you don' need a nunchuk. But I definitely found that holding the controller in a gun accessory gave me extra stability, so that's a great bonus.
Now when the game starts, you have 60 seconds on the clock. These count down and you have to successfully shoot bubbles to keep the time increasing. A miss loses time, a large bubble gets more time but less points and a small bubble gets less time but more points. You also get combo bonuses for shooting the same colour bubbles in succession.
There are 20 levels to work through and lots of bonus bubbles to aim for.
There are 2x, 3x, 4x & 8x bubbles, skulls (well, I thought they were skulls but looking at these images, I'm not so sure...), slo-mo bubbles, that slow the movement down so you can clear the screen, "nuclear" bubbles that wipe an area out, and more.
The colour themes keep changing as you progress through the levels as do the direction the bubbles travel in. There is a simple chill-out backing track playing as you shoot. The bubbles react very realistically and bounce away from each other - it is fascinating to watch.
Also as bubbles appear onto the screen, they are small (maximum points) but rapidly grow larger, so you must try to catch them as quickly as possible.
One criticism is the lack of a calibration screen for your aim. Also there is a delay from pressing the button to the bubble actually popping, which becomes slightly surreal after a while.
I really enjoyed this shooting puzzle, and got to level 9 before just ending the game by missing as I had just wanted to try it out. There is an online leaderboard and you can forward your best scores to friends in your address book.
All in all, a good £5 worth, so long as you don't feel silly shooting bubbles instead of men!
7/10
POP: brief review
Linear Mode
