Europe’s second biggest social game developer Megazebra has launched their new game Marble Trails. Megazebra is known for developing rather casual social games on Facebook. The Munich based developer has a portfolio of over a dozen of games reaching from Sudoku to jewel matching games. Most Megazebra users, however, are found on the companies’ Mahjong series, consisting of Mahjong Trails (2 million monthly active users) and Mahjong (about 470.000 monthly active users).

The difference between Mahjong and Mahjong Trails is mainly, as the name suggests,  the trails element: with every level the user is advancing on a map. Once every level on the map has been solved the user moves on to the next map. This feature lets the users see their friends advancing on the map too. The trails’ effect is enormous if you consider the user numbers.

In their new game Marble Trails Megazebra did something very similar. They took a very popular bubble shooting game, added and polished characters into the game and added their typical trails feature.

The game goes like this: The player is leading its character, an adventurous turtle, through differently themed worlds. Each world consists of a set of levels. The core game itself is a spiral trail bubble shooter. At the end of each world there is a boss fight where the marbles strings need to be cleared out of the way to allow direct shots at the boss fight character. Ones the character is beaten the turtle moves on the next map.

The user has a maximum of 5 lives that are used up every time a level is played. One live is refilled every 15 minutes. Additional lives and different power ups can be purchased.

In contrast to Megazebra’s rather relaxing games in portfolio Marble trails is an engaging mix between Popcap/EA’s Zuma Blitz, Wooga’s Bubble Island or Diamond Dash and Megazebra’s successful Mahjong Trials.