Yumsters

Doctors recommend that you eat your food slowly. It aids digestion, helps prevent over-filling, and avoids the awkwardness of finishing ages before everyone else (okay, I made up that last one).

However, if you eat too slowly your food grows cold and loses much of its appeal.

And in a genre full of snack gaming, Yumsters is a bit like taking two hours to savour a biscuit. The material is fine, but the pace of consumption just doesn’t suit it.

While it looks every inch the three-year-old game that it is, Yumsters is ostensibly a bright, breezy casual game that involves guiding a group of worm-like creatures to successive pieces of juicy fruit. Each worm can only eat fruit that shares its colour – so the red worm alone can eat strawberries, for example.

In each level you get a quota of fruit that needs eating, which you achieve by grabbing each worm’s head and leading it to the fruit. You can feast on multiple pieces of fruit at once, as long as the worm’s trailing body is in contact with it.

You can only reach fruit when no other objects – be that other coloured fruit or other worms – is in the way. Helping with this, you can reposition your worms to any of the holes dotted around the levels by – you guessed it – dragging them across.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these core mechanics - indeed, they're quite original - but the execution is excruciatingly slow. It takes ages for each piece of fruit to get eaten, leaving you twiddling your thumbs waiting for a worm to finish.

You can fill some of this time by touching coins that appear at the top of the screen, but this is a small, simplistic task that can’t hide its time-filler status.

After a while you do get a special worm that enables you to speed up the eating process, but it shares a fault with the rest of the game in that it’s just too ponderous and not very satisfying to get working.

There’s nothing wrong with casual games adopting a relaxed pace, but Yumsters fails to give you enough to chew on to fully justify the time spent at its table.