Super Slyder

No matter what field you work in, hard work can go some way to making up for a lack of natural ability.

As soon as that workrate drops, though, any weaknesses tend to be cruelly exposed.

Super Slyder is a pretty average puzzler regardless of the platform you play it on, and this Android version only emphasises that fact thanks to a slightly sloppy conversion.

It’s a familiar premise – slide an object (in this case a sentient blob) to each level exit by swiping or tilting your handset up, down, left, or right. Every time you do so, the blob moves in that direction until it hits a solid object (or an attempt-ending hazard).

As such, you must use your environment to align yourself with the exit. Simple walls are the chief facilitator, but far more interesting are the special blobs. These include those that prop you up, those that eat you and those that destroy any blob they come into contact with (good or bad).

The level furniture tends to be a little less inspired, such as the keys that unlock obstructing walls. Some are even downright bad ideas, such as the ceiling tiles that hide any objects below them, bringing an unwelcome level of randomness to the levels they inhabit.

While Super Slyder is an adequate puzzler, it simply fails to excite in such a crowded genre. There’s nothing new here, and it doesn’t help itself by taking an age to get going. More than 30 levels pass before the tutorials dry up and the game really feels like it’s started.

These weaknesses aren’t helped by a fairly shonky conversion – at least on our test Motorola Milestone. The first noticeable problem was the screen, which failed to stretch out to the entire width, leaving an ugly black border down the right hand side.

Then there are the controls, which are annoyingly slow to respond in swipe mode and downright broken in accelerometer mode.

The fact that the former is the default control method (unlike in the iPhone version) suggests that the developer was well aware that accelerometer implementation was less than satisfactory.

It all points to a slightly lazy conversion of a pretty ordinary game. Hopefully the developer will improve any handset-related technical issues in future updates, but right now Super Slyder simply isn’t a strong enough game to warrant persevering with unless you have a handset that runs it perfectly.