Hands-on with Bliss Island for PSP

Here on Pocket Gamer, we relish dissimilarity. The very idea of everything being alike has us foaming at the mouth while rocking savagely from side to side. It doesn't mean we also feel the need to ride our Zimmer frames through city streets wearing nothing but our modesty, but... Hell, you get the idea.

So when preview code as refreshingly different as Bliss Island shows up in the post, it's something of a good day.

We typed a few words about the game back in September, so we won't waste many more repeating ourselves here. But for the sake of any fans of a quick fix lifestyle who may be reading, Bliss Island functions as a series of mini-games, and is based on an original PC casual game. For PSP it's had its content tweaked, boosted and given considerably more depth.

And a good thing too because after excessive similarity, the thing that best tempts out Mr Hyde from our frail, barely functioning carcasses, is shallowness. We don't mind it in people, but abhor it in games. It's enough to get our blood flowing.

So in addition to making the original PC mini-games more of a challenge and thus both more engaging and enjoyable – such as the way Fruit Slam Dunking now requires you to carefully plan the trajectory of the fruit you fire into the mouth of a gluttonous Jigoka monster while avoiding treacherous obstacles – there's also an entire cluster of new games.

Bee Racer is, would you believe it, a topdown racing event featuring bees; Sky Walker requires you to collect stars while leaping from one cloud-high pole to another and working your way towards the exit; Forest Frenzy has you jumping up a tree, swallowing floating fruit on your way to the top; and, brilliantly, Boulder Billiards doesn't lose the tactical brilliance of the game it emulates, but further improves the formula by getting you to clear the makeshift baize by convincing balls of the same colour to touch and instantly vaporise. Fail to get any two to connect in three shots and it's game over.

And those are just some of the single-player bits – an additional four, two-player wireless games will be offered (although only one, Fluffy Football, isn't available to lonely types). While we'd love to tell you how this change of dynamic alters things, though, we can't, because no one else has got a Bliss Island preview UMD yet. We're special like that.

What we can tell you is that nearly all of the nine mini-games we tried out play very solidly. The game's physics model, so central to most of the activities on offer, is certainly convincing, although if we had to be picky we could mention Miki, the character from Forest Frenzy, feels a little too rigid and as such makes life unnecessarily more difficult than if she was able to absorb her landings a bit better.

And if you held a gun to our senile brains and demanded a further criticism, then there's always the arguable notion that manoeuvring the ball – that has to sequentially bash the descending blocks – within the play area in Brick Invaders can feel a little claustrophobic. Then again, you could strongly dispute this by claiming that perhaps the resulting difficulty is intentional.

What isn't deliberate, we suspect, is the overall difficulty level. We'll readily admit our crippled fingers are unable to provide the android-like reflexes needed to progress into the higher stages of this as-yet-unbalanced preview code. That's nothing to be alarmed by – most games go through exactly the same process before release – and developer PomPom has proved with previous creations that it understands the delicacy involved in setting players a challenge. So consider us thoroughly reassured.

Indeed, that's ultimately how we come away from our initial stay on Bliss Island. Partly because the foundations for a fun experience appear firmly in place – the developer would have to really mess things up to get this wrong between now and the game's release. But also because, even in that frankly implausible situation, Bliss Island would still provide a very different PSP experience. And that's exactly what Sony's handheld is crying out for.

Expect us to review Bliss Island as soon as PomPom has ceased tweaking it. In the meantime, you can check out the game's trailer by clicking on 'Watch It!' to download it.