Bobble Biker - Review

The developers of Juice Factory have a new Windows Phone game over at the Marketplace. Bobble Biker is a motorcycle race game that has you navigate through a series of jumps, bumps and hazards without crashing or losing your head.

Bobble Biker has the multi-level race game, a race track creator and access to other user-created race tracks. Along the way you can earn cash to unlock addition bikes, upgrades and get new racers.

To read more on Bobble Biker, make the jump past the break.

The Menus

The main menu of Bobble Biker will send you to the game menu, race creator, get free money (daily hand-out), a link to the Marketplace to rate the game, and a help/options menu.

The game menu of Bobble Biker gives you access to the race course, the Playground where you can access user-created courses, race on the courses you've created and access the choose your which bobble headed biker you want to race with.

The Help/Options Menu gives you access to the games options (sound effects, music, and tilt sensitivity), tip/tricks, game reset, and the typical contact developer, credits, and support links.

Game Screen

When you work your way to the game screens (the Race or Playground) you will get to choose your difficulty level, course, level (Race Mode) and bike (Race Mode). You will also have access to the online leaderboard before you start the Race Mode.

The game screen is modestly laid out with forward and reverse controls resting in the left/right corner of the screen. Your time is in the bottom center with access buttons for the main menu and to reset the game in the upper left and right corners respectively.

While you have controls for speed, you control your biker's balance by tilting your Windows Phone left or right. To make things interesting, your biker has a bobble-head (hence the name Bobble Biker) that you can loose if you go under obstacles too fast. Hint: you'll need to slow down for these obstacles so your head can compress and safely bounce under things.

Game Play

Game play was fun with Bobble Biker and rather challenging. Graphics were well presented and the courses rather interesting.

In the Race Mode, to advance to the next level you'll have make it across the finish line. The quicker your time, the more money you earn and each level can be re-played to better your score. You have four racing venues or cups to tackle. Each with eight levels of courses.

The Playground Mode downloads user-created tracks based on difficulty that you race for bragging rights.  This collection is a mixed bag of courses but all that I played while testing out Bobble Biker were challenging.

Course Creator

To add to the appeal of the game, you have the ability to create your own courses, and submit them to the developer and possibly have them added to the community collection of courses.

The creator is fairly simply to learn your way around. In the upper left corner is your zoom in/out controls and demo the course button. In the upper right are navigation buttons to move between the check points.

Your course begins with a short wooden section with one check point and the finish line. At the bottom of the screen are controls to add check points, jumps and the what nots. Under the "Level" button you can save the course, create a new one, delete the course, submit the course to the developer or exit to the main menu.

There is a Help section available when you first start the creator that sends you the developer's site for hints and help. But for the most part, the old trial and error method of learning the creator works the best.

Overall impression

I have to admit, Bobble Biker grew on me. I like the course creator and the ability to race on other users tracks. The animations are nice and it's fun to watch the bobble-headed racer's head bounce about as you make a hard landing. Crashes are also well animated with body parts of the Bobble-head rider going all over the place (not in a bloody mess kinda way) that's kinda cool (which is probably wrong to think in some way).

Bobble Biker is challenging enough to keep you interesting but not too hard to become boring. I do wish there were more levels in the Race Mode but having access to other tracks in the Playground Mode balances things out. Still, hopefully the developer will be adding more courses with the next update.

Bobble Biker is a free game for your Windows Phone and well worth checking out. You can download it here (opens Zune) at the Marketplace.