Aqua World

Despite thousands of years of human exploration, the world under the sea remains almost entirely unknown. The crushing pressure levels found deep underwater mean that new species of crazy looking aquatic life are found every year, complete with huge bulging eyes and freakish body shapes.

Conversely, Aqua World inflicts about as much pressure as a gentle hug and stars a multicoloured ball.

Aqua World puts you in charge of a ball that bounces up and down automatically when it hits an obstacle. Your job is to steer left and right into coloured blocks that share the same shade before rushing into a clam to finish the screen.

To help accomplish this task, every level contains indestructible blocks that alter your ball’s colour. These can sometimes be hidden behind blank blocks that require hitting to reveal, or placed strategically around the screen.

The trick is to manoeuvre carefully around the colour changing blocks until you need to alter the ball’s shade. To make things a little more interesting there are power-ups and spiky blocks that instantly kill you. Don’t worry too much about running out of lives, though - the game merely hands you one more every time you run out.

Aqua World does look and feel very nice. The graphics and animation are colourful and smooth, the music surprisingly pleasant and the controls responsive, so navigating the ball around the occasional spike is easy.

The problem is, it’s a little too easy. The game rarely places more than two spiky deathtraps on a screen until level 30 (out of 45), which makes progress swift and slightly dull. Even after adding more traps, you never get the feeling of urgency, as by this point the life counter will be well into double figures.

To offset this, Aqua World allows the player to select from three difficultly levels, but they seemingly do nothing. There's a clock ticking down on every level, but it’s so hard to run out of time that you might not notice it exists.

All this conspires to create a game that, while never aggravating or frustrating, never truly becomes engaging. It’s a pleasant enough experience that looks very polished during the few hours it lasts, but it’s not something you’ll want to return to.