Badabump

Badabump is a bubble shooter wrapped around a small dragon with a cold. His fireballs have frozen solid, and knocking them into each other is how you thaw them out. The premise is decoration; underneath it is the same mechanic that has survived since Puzzle Bobble, and it has survived because it is very good. You fire a coloured ball at a cluster hanging above you, and when three or more of a colour touch, they pop. Anything left dangling with nothing to hold it falls too, which is where the real scoring is. The genre rewards a specific kind of patience: the obvious shot clears three, the good shot clears three and drops eleven more that were hanging off them.

A ball is loaded and ready at the bottom of the screen. Aim it at the cluster above and fire. Three or more touching balls of the same colour pop and disappear. Any balls that were only attached to the cluster through the ones you just popped lose their anchor and fall as well. The cluster creeps down over time, and it reaching the bottom is how a run ends.

Learn to bank shots off the side walls early. The single most useful skill in a bubble shooter is putting a ball somewhere you cannot reach in a straight line, and every genuinely good clear depends on it. Shoot at the ceiling attachments rather than the lowest balls — detaching a cluster from the top drops everything below it at once, which is worth ten separate pops. Watch the next ball in the queue, not just the one loaded, so you can set up a two-shot combination. And when nothing good is available, park a ball somewhere harmless at the edge rather than forcing a bad match in the middle that will make the cluster wider.