Keep The Ball Bouncing in Bumpin
Bumpin ($0.99) by DataPlayed is reminiscent of those games where you keep the ball up in the air for as long as you can.
All you have to do is keep a ball from falling off the edge of the screen or bumping into a hazard. The only way you can interact with the ball is by drawing green pegs anywhere on the screen. The pegs appear in a dotted line, though you’re limited to only 10 pegs at a time.
Keeping with the hand-drawn theme, the gameplay takes place on a piece of crumpled looseleaf paper. Five balls rest at the top of the screen, and one will fall at a time. Draw pegs anywhere on the screen to bounce the ball off them or bumpers.
You rack up potential points for every time the ball bounces off something. The points are potential because they only actually count if the ball makes it to the goal.
This makes for some interesting gameplay because you’ll want to balance earning points against too much showboating. Getting greedy might mean bouncing the ball into a spiky box or knocking it out of bounds.
Four modes are available for play: Challenge, Zen, Normal, and Painful. Though the differentiation between the modes is hard to tell. Challenge provides different levels and painful will obviously be harder, but I have no idea what makes zen so "zen."
One bug I noticed was the occurrence of what I call “ghost pegs.” In the middle of my game, after I had drawn pegs everywhere, I noticed that my ball bounced off pegs that weren’t there. I would watch the ball bounce toward open space, only to get bounced back. The ghost pegs weren’t consistent, though they haunted my gameplay nonetheless.
Overall, this is a fun game. I caught myself sneaking in a quick game whenever I could spare some time.
