Bubble Galaxy with Buddies: Head-to-head bubble popping comes to iPhone

Taking a page from the "Book of Zynga," iOS developer Scopely has released Bubble Galaxy with Buddies on iPhone in the Canadian iTunes store. The game feels like it could be the newest installment in Zynga's "With Friends" franchise, as it takes a familiar gameplay type (that being the bubble-popping "puzzle game") and turns it into a truly social experience as you'll go head-to-head with friends and strangers alike to earn the most points possible over three rounds.

Each round in Bubble Galaxy with Buddies lasts 60 seconds and is played as you would expect, as you'll need to shoot bubbles towards the top of the screen in order to destroy groups of three or more like-colored bubbles. Power-ups allow you to have a constant trajectory for where your shots will land, bombs that will destroy mass groups of bubbles on contact, and point orbs that will count for many more points than a normal bubble would when destroyed.

While you can easily connect your account to Facebook in order to find your true friends to challenge, you can also play against random opponents in either the free-to-play, ad-supported version, or the $1.99 ad-free version of the game. Thankfully, you can have multiple active matches at once, but matches cost coins to play, depending on how many power-ups you wish to have active in each. You'll earn coins for successfully completing matches, so thankfully that doesn't seem so unfair.

As you play, you'll eventually earn access to two additional characters, each with their own unique power-ups, on top of the game's monkey mascot. After finishing 25 games, you'll unlock a fox character that allows you to highlight matches on the board or freeze time (as examples), while completing 80 games unlocks a bear that comes with a meteor that allows you to destroy all bubbles in its path. If you'd rather have these abilities from the beginning, you can also spend $0.99 or $1.99 to unlock each character, respectively.

%Gallery-166444%

In addition to all of this, playing just a few matches will unlock a mission series, giving you even more incentive to keep playing, other than simply beating friends and strangers with your skills. You may be asked to collect coins by playing, score a certain amount of points in a single match and so on, with this mission system simply being icing on a cake that was already pretty great.

Bubble Galaxy with Buddies should launch in the United States sometime in the near future, but if you have access to a Canadian iTunes account, you can now try it out for free. Either way, if this is the quality we can expect from future titles in Scopely's "with Buddies" franchise, the future is looking pretty bright.

Click here to download Bubble Galaxy with Buddies on the Canadian iTunes store --->

What do you think of Bubble Galaxy with Buddies? Sound off in the comments!