Bacterium

You can take your Call of Dutys, your Gears of Wars, and your Halos: sometimes, there's nothing quite as addictive as a plain and simple puzzler, intentionally devoid of plot or any sense of 'wow' and 'ka-pow' whatsoever.

Bacterium is one such prospect – a game that initially comes across as entirely one dimensional, but one that soon extends in a number of different directions, each one faithful to the game's fundamentals.

As a result, it's not hard to leap straight from one mini-game to another – as the main mode instructs – without losing your way. This is namely because each and every take on play revolves around the same idea: converting hexagons.

Playing out on multicoloured grids of different sizes, you start out controlling one hexagon on each map. Bacterium then allows you to convert any hexagons in contact with your own by choosing particular colours to 'cure'.

For example, if you pick blue, any blue hexagons touching the area you control will automatically join your party. In some cases, the idea is to take control of each and every cell within a set number of moves and a set time.

However, the most entertaining modes are those in which you race against a rival, either attempting to take control of more cells as the map fills up, or racing to cure a set hexagon on the other side of the screen.

As plain as that may sound, it can lead to tight, tense battles in practice, where employing tactics rather than picking out colours at random plays an increasingly important role.

Often, efforts to block your rival off rather than merely race to your goal prove the most fruitful, though this is a move the game's AI perfects first – Bacterium's bots display a startling level of sophistication from the off.

An ill-advised take on Snake aside (where chasing down hexagons and avoiding obstacles are the key), Bacterium does a brilliant job of tying all of the modes up neatly, without making them feel overly similar.

So gelled is the package as a whole, it's hard to reach a cut-off point during play – one game simply rolls on into another, and the prospect of stopping isn't an attractive one.

In fact, it's no exaggeration to say Bacterium is just as effective at infecting your mind as it is the cells that populate its grids.