Laze

I don't know about you, but I always used to avoid the house of mirrors at the local theme park. I have enough to deal with looking at my ugly mug in a normal mirror – I'm not exactly overly keen on seeing myself with added wobbly bits, making me look even more like the Michelin Man than I'm comfortable with. Nevertheless, manipulation of the norm is a theme that can liven up the most mundane tasks or objects, turning them into something quite special.

Managing manipulation is what Laze is all about, yet it has the canny ability of making it incredibly easy to do so. There are, essentially, only two control methods at your command, but they let you take charge of a laser beam, bouncing it off walls and passing it through transparent prisms so that it reaches a goal on the other side of the screen.

Quite simply, you control the beam in order to direct it into a specified target. You do this by either moving the starting point by dragging it around with your finger or adjusting the trajectory of the beam. Usually, you end up combining the two tactics to make it work.

It's no easy task and the solution is often not immediately clear. More often than not, you'll find yourself randomly moving both elements to try and find the correct combination. While this might sound rather haphazard and random, it's actually educational. It's only by experimenting and seeing how the laser reacts when it hits certain objects that you begin to learn and find the solutions almost by instinct. This sort of tactical play surprisingly succeeds in making the game less of a mindless trial-and-error puzzler and more of a brilliant mind tester.

There's also no pressure to do it in any timescale or to pick up any bonuses along the way, either. This is man versus laser and there's certainly challenge enough here to ensure that you won't miss any of these elements. The Training mode alone (which, incidentally, is less of a trainer and more just a set of simpler puzzles to solve) has 500 rounds to keep you entertained, with a further 100 levels packaged in the games imaginatively titled 'Challenge 100' mode, which turns up the difficulty a notch.

That's not to say that Laze is perfect. Simple and undecorated, this is a decidedly underwhelming title. If it weren't for the quiet brilliance of its gameplay it would be lost in its own shadow. This is most definitely a game that will appeal to a select audience, but for those who thrive on the kind of physical challenge Mensa would be proud of, Laze doesn't really put a foot wrong.