MoShinRo

If you're a keen mobile gamer, it's hard not take a peek whenever you see a stranger playing a game on their BlackBerry, mobile or iPhone. The curiousity is almost unbearable, but you know that if you actually started talking to them about their game, you'd come across a nutter.

You're likely to be disappointed anyway. Tetris, sudoku or solitaire is likely to be filling their screen rather than the fancy-sounding MoShinRo. Unfortunately, it's not as avant garde as it sounds.

Combining elements of sudoku and Minesweeper, MoShinRo involves finding objects hidden on a grid. A figure displayed at the end of each row and column hints at the number of objects waiting to be found. You're not placing numbers, though: just counters. Place one correctly and it shows up green. Get it wrong and that space turns red.

Each grid is also filled with with arrows that point towards where you need to place a counter, although it won't necessarily be right in front of the arrow. It boils down to a process of logical deduction, occasionally helped along by a spot of luck and guesswork should you feel daring.

The puzzle behind MoShinRo is solid and worth playing, but unfortunately the execution leaves much to be desired. Rather than taking a linear structure levels are randomly generated, split among three difficulty settings. If you maintain a certain average finishing time over ten levels, you can unlock four visual themes.

This is pretty limited motivation, though, considering the consistently unremarkable visuals. You're left to self-motivate, working to whittle down your personal best times within each of the difficulty levels. Still, this wouldn't be too much of an issue if the gameplay itself was rock solid, but there are issues here, too.

First, there isn't an option to place a question mark, tick, or annotation on a space. Touching a grid square puts down a counter instantly.

This isn't too much of an issue while you're sticking to the easier levels, but it becomes prohibitive when you move onto the harder ones. Placing a counter wrongly adds a fistful of seconds to your time, which obviously kills a speedy game. Such a feature is a staple of logic games like MoShinRo, so much so that not including it feels like a real oversight.

The controls aren't flawless either. There's noticeable lag between a tap of the screen and a counter appearing. It's seriously irritating when you're trying to finish the levels as quickly as possible.

Even worse, normal swift taps on adjacent squares are occasionally mistaken for a double tap. This brings up a time counter, as if to show you just how much the game's faulty interface is costing you.

Underneath MoShinRo's deficiencies is a game worth playing, but rival puzzlers have sorted out the majority of the issues that mar the experience here, offering with a more refined, polished experience.