The Sims Carnival Bumper Blast

With every new release, The Sims series pushes the boundaries of the genre and provides the fans with tons of new content to enjoy. However, you may not always have the necessary time to deal with a life simulator, especially since playing The Sims can be extremely time consuming. In those cases, a slightly less convoluted alternative may be more appropriate, such as this fun little game.

The Sims Carnival Bumper Blast is a simple arcade game in which you have to pair similar characters together and gather points in the process, in order to match them all and create neat color-based groups. To achieve this, however, you must also surpass a variety of obstacles and deal with various traps, while also taking full advantage of the power-ups you can find laying around.

Gameplay wise, it all revolves around your ability to shoot the blasts in the right direction and use the environment to steer them where you want them to go. Once the ball reaches another character, whether it's a match or not, you get to control it instead and you resume shooting from its position. Naturally, the blast bounces from walls and character groups that are already entirely matched, so you gotta pay attention to your shots as the levels get more and more convoluted.

To spice up the atmosphere, the later stages contain many traps and power-ups to help and disorient you at the same time. Hence, breakable walls can be brought down after a certain number of hits, but since you only have a limited number of shots per level, you really need to calculate them just right in order to make full use of each one. The power-ups themselves can be very effective and helpful, but they can also work against you if you fail to make proper use of them.

Due to the arcade nature of the game, you should not expect jaw-dropping 3D graphics and effects, but that doesn't mean it looks bad. Contrarily, the levels and the objects populating them are very well made, while the particle effects that make an appearance every time something exciting happens should make the experience very pleasant and refreshing.

Just like any other game of this type, The Sims Carnival Bumper Blast has the potential to become highly addictive after you get lost into it for a few minutes, especially since the levels get increasingly more challenging and new mechanics always make an appearance. The game should definitely appeal to the fans of the Sims franchise as well.