TNT Master

For all their enduring popularity, puzzle games tend to struggle a bit in the theme department. It's hard to excited about chess pieces, or dripping taps, or abstract blocks.

TNT Master has found a way to explode this lingering malaise. Rather than shuffling everyday household objects, here you're using dynamite to solve puzzles. Lots and lots of dynamite.

You'll have to strategically place the charges you're supplied with each level on various structures of metal and wood. The objectives vary from puzzle to puzzle.

Often they revolve around destroying certain objects while leaving others intact. Sometimes there are other goals, like razing anything standing down to ground level.

While any gamer is going to set about this task with pyromaniacal glee, they'll soon run into a small problem.

Physics puzzles are often based on everyday objects because they involve the sort of everyday physics that people intuitively understand. For most, that experience will not extend to blowing stuff up with TNT.

So it takes a lot of trial and error before you start to get a feel for how you can solve the puzzles with some degree of skill. As opposed to placing charges at random and stabbing the detonate button just to watch things burn.

As things begin to fall into place, the game becomes intriguing. Different materials behave in unexpected ways depending on the situation.

Placing a heavy charge on top of a steel beam might send it flying on one level. Doing the same on the next, with a beam embedded in concrete, merely bends it at the tip.

Experimentation and exploration are the order of the day. And when things behave in unexpected ways, it's super satisfying to clear a difficult level.

Even once you've got a sense of how things work, the feeling of chaos never quite goes away. Although that's not always a bad thing.

It helps to keep proceedings feeling fresh, especially once you're tired of the limited palette of three types of dynamite and a few different materials.

If you can crest that initial curve, and are comfortable with a bit of unpredictability, TNT Master is a fun and unusual puzzle game. It just doesn't quite have the replay value that its creative premise appears to promise.

Having mastered the basics, the puzzles diversify. New situations include things like indestructible beams and gravity-altering bombs. Or levels where you have to do things like land debris from the explosion onto target areas.

At this point you start wondering. Did the developers designed the puzzles to challenge players who've mastered the unpredictable physics? Or are they're there to try and wrest level clearance purchases out of you.

The truth is a mixture of both, and that should suit players of all stripes. Those who relish the increasing difficulty can get their teeth into the game, and those who don't can up the pitiful asking price for a pass.

There are a good many levels in TNT Master. Four geographical settings, with about thirty puzzles in each. But after a while, the diversity on display does begin to run out of steam.

Fanatics can go back and try to maximise their star rating on each level. But given the chaotic physics, most players will be pleased enough with a pass. It's not sufficient motiviation to revisit puzzles.

You might expect that visual pyrotechnics and sound would carry the day, but actually they aren't up to all that much.

Still, the entry price is cheap and the game is creative enough to stand proud amongst the gray backdrop of identikit puzzlers on the app store.

Anyone with a passing interest in the genre, or in seeing how demolitions work in real life, should take this for a spin. It might just blow your mind.