Amoebas

The humble amoeba, subject of GCSE biology classes the nation over, is one of those things you soon forget about once you leave school. Let’s face it, we’ve got more important things on our mind, like shopping, what we’re going to have for tea tonight or whether our bum looks big in these trousers or not. A single-celled organism comes pretty far down the list.

And that’s where amoebas (the organisms) and Amoebas (the game) are going to stay. We don’t say this lightly: we’ve not come across as shallow and unrewarding a puzzle game since we tried our three-year-old nephew’s wooden farmyard animal jigsaw puzzle (4 pieces, age 2 and up). Cheap it may be – at the time of review it sold for just £1.50 on O2 – but that’s no excuse for offering a game that’s so limited that you’ll start, finish and become bored of it in the space of 15 short minutes.

It’s based on a mildly intriguing premise; as an amoeba you have to colonise a screen that’s full of differently coloured squares. You do this by changing your squares’ colours, thus absorbing all of the squares bordering on your territory that are that colour too. So, starting off with one coloured square, you need to colonise more squares than your computer opponent can.

Whilst this sounds okay in theory, it's let down in practise by the fact that you choose colours by picking one of two colours offered. Hence, rather than a brain-taxing strategic challenge, most games coming down to pressing the button to choose a colour faster than the computer. With just four opponents on offer: easy, medium, hard and bonus (a glitterball for some strange, unexplained reason), there’s no longevity to the game at all. Beating the first three will be accomplished on your first or second try. The glitterball may take two or three additional attempts but that, too, will be quickly vanquished.

And that’s it. There’s no multiplayer mode which could have been good, passing the phone back and forth two a friend, for instance, which would be a bit like playing squares at school. There’s absolutely no motive to return and play the computer opponents again as the game is just so un-involving and, to be honest, dull.

Perhaps we’re being too hard though – the developers might have worked hard to make a game that’s as forgettable, tiny and meaningless as the single-celled organism after which their game is named. If that’s the case, they’ve succeeded spectacularly.