Aurora Feint II: Tower Puzzles

Can you imagine splitting up your traditional Sunday supper? As a child, I was almost obsessive about doing just that, eating every element – potatoes, meat, veggies – one by one.

While the whole package is designed to please, there will always be some who prefer things solo.

Tower Puzzles is the product of such thinking, taking the static puzzle components out of Aurora Feint II: The Arena and giving them centre stage. This is a sphere-shifting puzzle game for those who don't have the desire to tussle with role-playing elements.

Though presented in the same elvish manner as Aurora Feint, Tower Puzzles simplifies its gameplay. The aim is to get three or more spheres of the same colour in a row to clear them from the board.

Every sphere you have to play with is there from the start, though, and you only have a set number of moves to clear them all with.

This means you spend as much time thinking as you do playing. With movement restricted (each sphere you move or each tip of the phone counting as one move), you have to plan ahead, triggering chains to ensure all of the spheres are cleared.

The temptation to make obvious hook ups forces you to consider moves carefully before swiping your finger across the screen.

Initially, success comes with just a flick of your finger, sliding and swapping spheres from left to right so so that they line-up and disappear. Once cleared from the board, any spheres that sat on the top then fall into place, hopefully uniting them with their kind and wiping them from the screen in turn.

As the levels pass using the accelerometer becomes more crucial, allowing you to subtly shift the order of the spheres as they slide whichever way you've tipped your phone.

It's very rarely the only move you'll make, although it can often form the foundation of your strategy, giving you a slightly different angle into what can initially seem like an impenetrable set-up of tiles.

While the concept is a plain one, it allows the actual challenge presented to flourish. Split into a hierarchy of four groups of levels that run from Easy through to Expert, even the step-up to Medium is a hard one to make.

Trial and error become your only option if careful thought and consideration fails to come up trumps. There are plenty of mountains to climb here once you've cleared the early (and fairly shallow) hurdles, but there's no penalty for failure.

With thirty seven levels on offer, there's also no guarantee you'll ever make it to the end – this is a puzzler that could sit undefeated on your iPhone for as long as you own it.

Its simplicity might give it longevity, yet the lack of variation inherent in Tower Puzzles will make it too routine for others.

This is Aurora Feint II stripped down to one of its core elements. If you prefer to squash all the ingredients onto one fork, it might taste just that little bit less sweet when tackled alone.