Honeycomb Beat

Life is tough for a honeybee. If they get angry and sting someone they die, if they have sex they die (due to their 'barbed' sex organs), and when they're six weeks old they die anyway because they've worked themselves ragged into an early bee-sized grave. It all sounds a bit miserable.

Honeycomb Beat is definitely more fun than that, although it's almost as hard going. Beneath a colourful, bee-themed exterior lies a fiendishly exhausting puzzler capable of wilting the brightest of brains. It starts off like a straightforward tile-flipping challenge, but the honeycombed puzzles soon get as complex as a ten story beehive.

Your goal in each level is to turn each of the stage's honeycomb pieces over until they're all grey. There's nothing more to it than that – although you're only allowed ten goes, or 'beats' as the game calls them, to complete the puzzle. What makes this difficult is that when you flip over one six-sided comb, all the immediately joined ones turn over as well. This can leave you like a dog chasing its tail – continuously flipping pieces only to end up turning already grey combs back to orange on your quest for all-grey.

Controlling the game is simple – you just highlight the different honeycombs by moving around them with the numbered keys or joystick, then flip them with '5' or by pressing down on the joystick.

The key early trick is being able to get all the orange combs into a corner where one comb only connects on one or two sides, but wildly complicated solutions are called for in the later, more elaborately shaped honeycombs.

Simply completing each of the game's 100 puzzles isn't enough either, since you're up against a timer and playing for points. Although you can continue playing after the timer has run out, you won't score any points, resulting in a pass instead of an awarded star for that stage.

Weirdly, while the number of beats you have to solve a puzzle is set to ten, the undo button means they're essentially limitless because you can undo a move as many times as you like, right back to the start. Again though, the more beats you use, the less you score, but at least you can try out lots of different solutions without constantly restarting.

Similar to sudoku, there's no real variation in each puzzle – just the shape and which combs which begin orange or grey coloured. Completing a puzzle is rewarding, particularly the very hard ones, but getting to see the next one isn't much of incentive when the presentation is so constant throughout.

One nice touch is the structure of how you play – the level select menu is like one giant honeycomb and when you complete one puzzle, you don't just unlock the next in that level, but also early puzzles in later levels. So if you've gone round in more circles than a bee trapped in a sunny conservatory when stuck on a puzzle, there are always plenty of others unlocked that you can move onto.

Also appreciated is the added bonus game. Here, honeycomb scrolls upwards on the screen with you needing to turn lines grey to make them disappear before they reach the top. It calls for different strategies to the main game's stationary puzzles, and beating your own (or your friends') high scores is fairly addictive.

Honeycomb Beat's visuals, though basic, do the job; the one embellishment on each top-down viewed honeycomb puzzle is a honeybee flying around. The only real sting in the tail presentation-wise is the music, which is about as irritating and bothersome as having a wasp in each ear. It's definitely best switched off.

This is a neat puzzle game with enough levels to keep you playing longer than the average honeybee is alive for, but it lacks any real hook. It's like a common dandelion, and when the going gets tough you'll likely give up and go in search of a bigger, spikier rosebush.