Aqua Rush
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| Aqua Rush

Remember 1999? It was the year of The Matrix, Kevin Keegan's stint as England Manager, President Clinton's impeachment and, perhaps most significantly, the death of Rod Hull. It was also the year that Namco released an absolute gem into Japanese arcades.

Now the publisher has decided to plumb the depths of its back-catalogue for inspiration, and has salvaged a real treasure of a game for us mobile owners.

Think of Aqua Rush as an inverted Tetris, with a few notable twists. Rather than controlling bog standard blocks as they succumb to gravity's pull, you are charged with rearranging underwater bubbles as they float to the surface. Unlike many examples of the genre, your blocks – sorry, bubbles – are not rigidly defined shapes, and you won't be asked to rotate them. Rather, you can add any number of extra vertical sections to your bubbly cluster.

You manipulate each cluster's position using the thumbstick, and add extra nodules to them with the number keys – '1', '4' or '7' to expand the left section of your cluster, '2', '5' or '8' for the middle and… well, you get the idea. The important thing to know is that it works.

The purpose of these bubble-shaping antics is to make them fit snugly into the field of static bubble formations that block your route to the surface. Complete a horizontal line of bubbles and they disappear, allowing those below to float up to the next layer and – if you've played you cards right (or been a bit jammy) – connect with the next layer up to complete another line.

In this way you can set off an exhilarating chain reaction of bursting bubbles, and you'll rise to the surface at a bends-inducing rate. Of course, fail to make enough complete lines and the screen will clog up, leading eventually to the Game Over screen.

It's this constant teetering between triumph and disaster that makes Aqua Rush such a compelling experience. At any given moment you'll be one sloppy move away from failure.

Unfortunately, however, it's this precarious element that serves to accentuate the game's niggling frustrations.

For an already unforgiving experience, Aqua Rush doesn't help you out much. We're as fond of a challenge as anyone, and we appreciate the game's hardcore arcade roots, but we feel it might have been a nice idea for Namco to provide an undo-last-move button. Early on in the game in particular, we would often find ourselves mistakenly adding an extra nodule to our cluster, completely messing up our rhythm. Cue panic and the inevitable restart.

It does get better, as your brain adjusts to the level of concentration required and your judgement of gaps and required shapes becomes instinctive. But we fear that there'll be many who won't stick around to reach this mental breakthrough. Which is a shame, as Aqua Rush really is magnificent fun.

It's nothing to write home about graphically, true, but it's bold and bright and conveys what it has to without any fuss. In fact, we grew quite fond of its retro styling. It's simple, functional and doesn't detract from the gameplay in any way.

And it's gameplay that's the key here. Whether you're playing through one of the three multi-stage difficulty levels, or trying to beat your high-score on the mesmerising Endless mode, Aqua Rush proves an engrossing way to pass either a five-minute tea break or a two-hour train journey. Providing, of course, that you can rise to the challenge.

Aqua Rush

In a genre bogged down with leaden ideas, Aqua Rush floats confidently to the top
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Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.