Dots and Boxes

Playground games are forever on the verge of breaking into a brawl. Even through the relatively civilized structures of trading cards, ball games or diddy digital pets, the core principal of proving your supremacy over your fellow man remains. The one-on-one confrontation has to be the height of this particular pastime, whether you're testing mind, body or the ability to flip coins into a glass (or your opponent's eye if you're a bit of a wrong 'un).

Of course, there's nothing necessarily playground-based to this core drive of beating down your fellow man, but Dots and Boxes has something of the schoolyard about it. First, the game is essentially concerned with arranging twigs or matchsticks in a sort of sub-Connect 4 frenzy. And second, the characters you get to adopt look like the detritus of some kid's cartoon, to be aired shortly after the school gates have spilled their afternoon guts.

You and your opponent get to take it in turns to lay down an aforementioned matchstick on the game grid. Your aim is to section-off squares of the grid. Doing so deals damage to your opponent. To take an enemy down completely, though, you'll have to arrange a sort of 'path' through the grid, allowing you to perform a combo of moves without giving your opponent a chance to retaliate.

Successfully sectioning-off an area also adds to your rage meter, and once this is full you can perform your character's special move.

There are six protagonists in total, all resplendent in their Nickelodeon-tinged glory. Each is equipped with a move, from simply causing additional damage to enabling the player to have a number of consecutive, matchstick-hogging turns.

Unfortunately, a crucial design misstep means you don't get to use these moves too often. The game gives you the first move at the start of each match, and thanks simply to the four-sided nature of the squares of a grid, this puts you at a disadvantage.

Your opponent, by definition, will always have the final side, assuming he doesn't make any blunders of judgement. This tends to be less of an issue in the Quick Mode, but the AI opponents of the Tournament option, where new characters are unlocked, hardly ever seem to make a duff move.

Even if this balancing issue wasn't so apparent, battles can seem incredibly long. Completing a game board doesn't finish an enemy off, but merely takes off more health. Actually defeating him will generally take several runs through.

If Dots and Boxes actually positioned itself as a straightforward puzzle game, this would perhaps be expected, but when the game is veiled under the translucent facemask of a fighting game, each battle ends up feeling like an exercise in attrition. That's not a good word to have to associate with a largely casual game.

Unlike its AI opponents, Dots and Boxes makes a number of crucial mistakes. There's a fundamental contradiction between the two styles of game that are mixed together here, a mix that curdles under the frustrations thrown up by its execution. Like two school kids tagged together by a teacher on the first day of school, they really need to part company post haste and make their own friends.