Diamond Tumble

We've had diamond twisting games before – but diamond tumbling? That's a new one. And a good one too, thanks to some of the niftiest physics we've yet been treated to in a mobile game.

The idea behind Diamond Tumble is simple. Each level contains a diamond, stored tantalisingly out of your reach atop a series of carefully balanced blocks.

Like a game of Jenga, but in reverse, you have to remove these blocks one by one in order to make the structures collapse and cause the diamond to tumble into the awaiting altar below.

It's not easy though, since you have a limited number of moves in order to reach the diamond. There's also the additional hassle that sending the diamond rolling onto the floor instead of the alter causes it to smash, and ends the level with a failure.

This means that levels are carefully considered affairs, where you're left trying to deduce exactly what will happen if you yank one block out from beneath another three.

What makes this particularly compelling are those aforementioned physics. We've seen a fair few fancy physics in home console games recently (for instance, Little Big Planet on PS3 and Professor Heinz Wolff's Gravity – remember him?). But those run on big old powerful consoles – you rarely see such top notch movement in a mobile game.

Okay, to be honest, Diamond Tumble isn't exactly up there with titles of Little Big Planet calibre either, but it's impressive for a little screen game all the same. Not only are the graphics rich and vibrant, but the most important bit – the stacks of rocks – behave just as they should. Whip one out from underneath and the whole lot drop and shift convincingly. It's not perfect – from time to time things get stuck in odd places – but it's as good as we've seen in a mobile phone game.

Even if it just used this basic idea, Diamond Tumble would be good, but it actually adds a whole lot more to its puzzles too.

Different types of block crop up throughout the game, and each works in a different way. So if you smash a red fire block, for instance, it will also destroy all the adjoining rocks. Nature rocks grow in size, twister rocks shrink and death blocks are invisible. This variety of stone means that not only are puzzles different just because of how the rocks are stacked, but also because of how they behave.

There's also the added challenge of completing a level within a certain number of moves. These moves are generous admittedly – you can usually progress onto the next level by just bashing in every rock on the level.

But in order to win the gold medal in a level, you'll need to complete it within a certain number of moves. For example, completing a level with two smashes might win you gold, in four wins you silver and in six wins you bronze.

Even if you breeze through the game quickly first time around, there are bound to be better medals you can go back and earn, as well as hidden relics to find.

There are also two different modes of play: Puzzle and Story. In Story you hunt for the city of El Dorado by cracking open temples (by playing a separate match-three-colours mini-game) and completing puzzles. Meanwhile, in Puzzle you simply play the levels you've unlocked but with a limit to how many rocks you can break.

There's plenty to play, and the puzzling is addictive. It's a shame the lovely visuals mean you have to suffer a lengthy loading screen every few levels (on our K800 build at least), but, that aside, Diamond Tumble is worth its weight in precious stones.