Hands on with Vivendi's Brain Shock

The basics of Brain Shock are simple. Faced with a grid of movable coloured blocks and various fixed obstacles, your task is to combine the blocks into groups of three or more of the same colour using only the fixed number of turns allowed for each level.

Your options in terms of the moves you can carry out are also fixed: rotate the grid 90 degrees left or right; nudge the blocks one step to the left or the right; or rotate the entire screen 180 degree, as this video of the first level demonstrates:

It looks pretty easy, but as the number of moves increases, the more complex your forward thinking has to become to solve the puzzle. Actually, scratch that. With the game not tracking the number of attempts you make before finding the correct solution (it doesn't reward you for solving the problem first time or twentieth time) you can experiment as much as you like until the law of probability mean you'll come up trumps. Things are a bit different in the Arcade mode, however. This is faster paced, as you have to reach a certain number of points within a fixed time period, while more blocks rise up from the bottom of the screen as you remove your combos. But, as we cunningly discovered, the first levels could be easily completed by just repeatedly hitting the 'rotate the screen 90 degrees' button. Still, we didn't get onto the levels where special blocks such as bombs, weights and timers make their appearance. Hopefully these will bring greater sophistication into play. Brain Shock is due to be released sometime in the autumn.