Block 'n' Roll

It's a sad fact of life that if you played every single mobile game that's ever been released then not only would you be left with arthritic thumbs and the fixed stare of a dead person, but you'd find the majority of them are instantly forgettable.

Of course, there are sadder facts of life. Like disease, and donkeys having to carry heavy objects up hills all day in the hot sun, but this being a review of mobile game Block 'n' Roll and all, I'm focusing on the relevant stuff.

And the reason for this pessimistic (but true) slice of relevance is that Block 'n' Roll very neatly slots into that category of mobile games. It's not a bad game by any means, but it's a forgettable one.

The reason for this is that it's a puzzler that, while it hasn't been done in exactly the same way before, feels very familiar. And uses a very boring premise.

It's very hard to imagine that at its planning meeting anyone got very excited when the idea was proposed. In fact, after the person who came up with it did so, I can only imagine the pitch was greeted by silence and a couple of stifled yawns, followed by someone proposing a tea break to restore some of the room's rapidly waning energy.

Even the game's main character has a boring name. It's Blocko, who has been entitled such because he can push blocks around in an isometric grid. Genius.

Blocko is a jumping blob with eyes, and those blocks have different coloured sides. Your goal throughout the game is to shove blocks around and line up three or more like-coloured sides to make them disappear.

At the start of each level you're given a list of criteria - say, 3x3 blue blocks and 1x5 yellow ones. Once you've managed to complete these objectives by lining them up, the level ends.

Of course, your grid being of a limited size, and these blocks being generated randomly every few seconds, your task gets harder the more blocks there are on the screen. Therefore, in order to clear yourself space for manoeuvre, you can either match up any old blocks, or stand on a square as a block is appearing then stamp on it to make it disappear again.

Thankfully, some more depth is offered by blocks containing runes, bonuses and 'special' blocks. These all work in much the way you'd imagine if you've ever played a puzzle game before.

Complete a line containing a block with a rune in it and you get one of three results depending on the rune, which smashes, detonates or flips over blocks within its blast range.

Bonus items, when collected, offer things like double score and the ability to slide instead of roll blocks for a limited time. And the three different bonus blocks include the invaluable Joker, which can be used as any colour in any line.

So far so average. But there's one thing that Block 'n' Roll does include which seems to indicate its creators don't hate us entirely, which is a decent Bluetooth multiplayer mode with two different games to play.

One's a sort of grid war where you're both fighting to cover it with more of your own colour. In the other you're racing for the most points.

It steps things up a notch in a game that might be perfectly playable and reasonably brain taxing, but hardly does anything to stand out from the crowd.

And it means that not only might Block 'n' Roll suit hardcore puzzle fans who've played all the better puzzlers out there, but also those after a decent two-player puzzle face off.