Synergy

Crisps are an annoying junk food. Small enough to be easily consumed, peppered with enough flavourings and salt to please the tastebuds for a few short minutes, but ultimately unfulfilling and quickly forgotten once eaten.

Synergy isn’t a crisp, but it does (surprisingly, given that it's a video game) bear comparison.

The game is a throwaway casual matching game that’s fairly diverting to play without ever offering more than a quick snack between meals.

The idea of the game is to match five coloured ‘things’ that fall down from the top of the screen in bunches of two. The only requirement for making a match is that the five ‘somethings’ have to be touching. That’s really all there is to it.

You can swipe across the screen or push the trackball/pad to move the blocks as they fall, Tetris style, while a swift tap reverses the two colours as they plunge headlong towards the ground.

Everything starts off fairly easy with only four different colours to worry about, but as the game goes on the number of colours increase and the speed escalates accordingly.

It’s all done with a professional appreciation of pacing. The difficulty curve is well laid out so that games begin to get tricky about five minutes in, so in total it’s rare that a single game goes too far past the ten minute mark.

There are a number of timed modes in place in case you’re in a rush, as well as a few ‘fastest to’ score attack games, but the gameplay on all the modes is effectively the same as the standard Endurance setting.

The most baffling aspect of the graphics, and the game in general, is how badly it all runs on the G1 handset I reviewed it with.

Despite the 3D effects consisting of little more than rotating, indescribable things, the game staggers and wheezes when the board approaches half-full, causing missed swipes and accidental drops aplenty during the most important time of a matching game.

While it’s highly likely a fancy Nexus One or Droid could probably eat this for breakfast and still have room for a few cheesy Doritos, the fact that such a basic game isn’t optimised to run on a mid-range or budget Android is a little alarming.

Speed bumps aside, Synergy offers up pretty much everything you’d expect from a casual matching title. There’s nothing really amazing about what it does, nor does it posses the fancy graphics to justify the bizarre slowdowns, but what is there is absolutely okay and will satisfy a gaming urge for a few minutes.