I do try to be patient and understanding with games that come to Switch that feel more suited to mobile platforms, but it can get tough sometimes. There is a point where the depth of an experience can warrant titles being both on phones and dedicated gaming systems, but too often a lack of ambition to be anything more than a way to kill some time is an obstacle. That’s the case with Life Bubble, a pretty simple casual sim that will have you slowly working to collect resources, ward off threats, expand the space you have to work in… and ultimately that’s just about it.

You’ll play as an astronaut who visits different planets, starting out with only a limited space that’s safe to work in, needing to collect resources that can be used to slowly expand that livable area. Gathering up various things like wood, crystals, gold, and more is simple enough as you’ll just need to stand in the vicinity of what needs to be harvested, and then you’ll diligently begin whatever efforts are required. You’ll then take what you’ve collected, and once you’ve got enough the next little area will be revealed, and so on. In order to spice things up to some degree you’ll also have small quests you can complete for cash, which you can use to make small upgrades to speed things up or otherwise help you out, as well as robots and some other minor threats that you’ll run into periodically. 

The first problem is that this is a very lather, rinse, and repeat sort of play loop, where you’ll get everything set up in one space, and then start over in another with relatively minor differences. The other is that your degree of participation is quite limited, with you simply moving from one spot to the next, and then waiting for your current task to complete. Worse, while you can slowly chip away at your time wasting tasks like some commoner, the game pretty well immediately trots out additional paid DLC to help things go more smoothly. As I’ve noted before, perhaps this would be acceptable if the game were free, but considering people have already paid to play the game in the first place, this shameless upselling to remedy a pain point purposely included in the game is pretty gross.

In the end, once again, I’d say if you think this looks like it could be something you could enjoy you should pick it up for your phone or some other mobile device. There’s nothing about the Switch that improves the gameplay, and most likely as a mobile game you’ll be able to play it for free. The experience is a bit threadbare and doesn’t have enough creativity behind it to incentivize seeing what comes next, you can just count on more of the same with slight differences at best. All together, that makes it tough to recommend.