Light Byte

Falling brick games like Tetris never go out of style, and Light Byte is a delightful addition to the genre.

It's a fairly simple premise - coloured blocks cascade from the top of the screen and you have to match two or more of the same colour to remove them and earn points. If you're slow to react, the blocks will hit the bottom of the screen, spelling Game Over.

Chaining together blocks earns you point bonuses. Matching eight of the same colour unlocks a brief bout of Frenzy mode, wherein you get to remove all the blocks you can tap.

Going from frantic tapping back to methodical matching will keep you on your toes, and the contrast takes a while to manage.

It sounds simple enough, but as you progress through the game things get decidedly trickier. The blocks fall with increasing speed, there are power-ups to collect, and after a while more colours are added.

This makes it much more difficult to get a long chain of the same colour going, as you have to make frequent adjustments to ensure that no blocks reach the bottom.

If a block isn't matched quickly enough, its colour will fade. This proves to be the most taxing element of all. If you forget the colour, you could ruin your current chain of blocks - taking a gamble and guessing the colour could lose you the level.

This may sound like a lot to get to grips with, but after a few rounds it all starts to make perfect sense. And once you're on top of it, the game is fiendishly fun. It takes real concentration, but the payoff that comes through clearing the screen completely or stringing together a great mix of power-ups and blocks is deeply rewarding.

You can unlock various Time Attack levels by racking up points in Endless mode. Time Attack is the same as Endless, but you have just 60 seconds to get as many points as you can.

It costs an easily obtainable 5 million to unlock the first level, but some of the later ones cost as much as 25 million points. While there's always the option of using in-app purchases, it would be nice if these were unlocked from the get-go.

Freemium reservations aside, Light Byte is exactly what a descendent of Tetris should be: uncluttered but still cutting edge in visual terms; simple but rich and challenging in gameplay terms; familiar; novel; and - above all - brilliant fun.