Crossbomb

I’ve never really taken to the massively popular desktop time-waster Minesweeper. While I appreciate the premise, it's just a little too random at times - in an Intermediate or Expert game, you'll more than likely have to take a stab in the dark more than once.

Crossbomb on Android is like Minesweeper lite, and it suffers from an even stronger reliance on luck.

The premise is fundamentally the same – locate the bombs hidden in a 2D grid by responding to numerical clues. If you tap on a square to reveal a number ‘4’, for example, that means there are no mines within four spaces.

The trouble comes when you’re down to your last few square, with none of the ‘clues’ (the game’s terminology for squares containing numbers) pointing to the definitive solution. The only thing for it is to hold your breath and guess.

Other than this considerable flaw Crossbomb is quite neatly realised, if a little on the sparse side.

Selecting boxes is pleasantly simple thanks to the chunky, uncluttered design, although ‘uncluttered’ strays dangerously close to ‘insufficient’ thanks to a lack of clearly defined touch areas in the menus.

You're limited to just two game modes – the default Normal mode and an unlockable Puzzle mode, which starts you out with a number of squares already revealed to you.

There’s not a great deal of variety as result of this, and the core gameplay isn’t quite deep enough or engrossing enough to bear the weight.

While playable and moderately fun within its own limited parameters, Crossbomb struggles because of a poorly conceived central idea. In concentrating the Minesweeper formula, the developer has accentuated one element that didn’t need pushing any further – its reliance on luck.