Freakballs

It is easy to get caught up with demanding a premise from a game, or at the very least a theme. Almost all of them have one, even in the absence of a narrative such as in puzzle games. Zuma has its Incan motif, Lumines its hip musical backbone with accompanying trance like visuals, and even Tetris has a reason behind its simple puzzle action, themed as it is on the reconstruction of a crumbling Russia.

Of course, a theme or premise is far from essential, but you have to be pretty damn sure that your game is more addictive than crack-flavoured Pringles if you are going to chance presenting it completely naked to a disparate and increasingly hard to please mobile gaming public.

In this respect, Gamego flies pretty close to the wind with Freakballs, such is its completely faceless design and gameplay so simple a five-year old could grasp it within seconds.

Upon loading a game, you are presented with four columns of jumbled red, green, blue and yellow balls. Each column has a trap door at the bottom, assigned to one of the four colours. You can switch any two balls next to each other horizontally by placing your cursor over it using the directional keys and hitting the fire button. Match a ball with the same coloured trap door and it falls through it. Line up a whole column of balls of the same colour before switching the correct coloured balls at the bottom to release them, and you effect a combo, scoring extra points. Simple.

There are of course various wildcards (wild balls just doesn't sound right) that mix play up a bit. There is a rainbow ball, which can be used as any colour in a combo, a clock ball that grants precious extra seconds in Time Attack games, as well as bombs and grenades that if not cleared quickly enough explode, destroying any bordering columns you have been lining up for a combo.

Although at first Freakballs is addictive, the absence of any real challenge besides high-score chasing soon betrays the game as a shallow experience. There are just four modes to choose from, beginning with Classic, which is a straight up timed score attack. The aforementioned Time Attack is essentially the same experience but with a less generous clock (set to one minute). Then there is Score Attack, a timed race to 5,000 points and, lastly, the oddly named Got Balls mode, requiring you to clear all the balls on the grid as quickly as possible.

The addition of a mode with, say, different levels where a certain score has to be achieved against the clock would have saved this game from its slightly formless structure. But as it stands, the absence of achievement yardsticks robs the game of any semblance of difficulty and makes repeat visits seem a little empty.

Similarly, once you get used to the idea of lining up the best possible combo, there only ever appears to be one logical choice to make at a time and tactical play is rarely encouraged.

Still, the presentation is good, if a little lacking in personality, and the music though repetitive is not as irksome as in many such games.

Freakballs is sadly something of a missed opportunity, then. The basic play mechanic is good, leading us to think that with some more interesting wild balls and a better structure, its addictiveness may have lasted beyond its first boot. As it stands, Freakballs has little to set itself apart in what is one of mobile gaming's more competitive genres.