Bubble Island was released almost two years ago (on February 1st 2010). Despite social games’ allegedly short lifecycle the Raccoon-themed bubble shooter is still going strong. It was recently selected as one of a handful of games to be tightly integrated into Facebook’s Timeline.

Developer: Wooga
Genre: Arcade, action
Platform(s): Facebook, Google+
Language(s): English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish
Monthly active users: 9.8 million (on Facebook, January 23)
Monetization: Free-to-play with paid premium currency

What’s inside?

A bubble shooting game with various social features and a very, very cute raccoon.

How to play

Bubble Island is a puzzle game based on a popular arcade gameplay: Users aim and shoot a bubble-cannon to pop three or more bubbles of matching colors hanging from a ceiling that is steadily moving closer.

Bubble Island is all about shooting colored bubbles - with a little help from a furry friend.

To add flavor to the old concept, Bubble Island is set on a Caribbean Island and its hero is a backpacking raccoon (name unspecified). The friendly mammal accompanies players through the game’s many stages, provides ammunition for the bubble cannon and cheers at high scores.
All the different settings are beautifully designed and vary greatly in style as well as difficulty to keep things interesting.

The game has two currencies: Lives and Coins. Coins enable players to retry and also provide help in harder levels. When a user doesn’t manage to clear all the bubbles in a level, one Live is lost. Running out of Lives means he or she must restart at the very beginning of the current stage. Friends can help each other to regain Lives – the more levels all in-game friends play in total, the more Lives are provided to each of them.

Special competitions are held regularly to encourage and promote user engagement.

Other social features include leaderboards, special competitions and achievements which are published in notifications stream and in a dedicated box on a player’s Facebook Timeline.

Who’s playing?

Bubble Island is preferred by female players of all age groups: 73 percent of users are women (according to data derived from Facebook’s ad targeting engine).