Lemmings Tribes

Beloved puzzler Lemmings still has it, even after all these years. The task of leading a group of lemmings past a level full of hazards to an exit point still has limitless appeal. Of course, it helps in the case of this new mobile game that the format near seamlessly suits play on a phone.

What this new mobile game doesn't offer is gameplay that varies much from the different games that have appeared in the series over the years, or even skills for your lemmings you won't have seen before.

What is does have are three distinctly different lemmings tribes to play with - Classic, Space and Medieval - which means there's plenty of variation and lots of game too.

Play with the Classic lemmings tribe and you're armed with a series of specialised lemmings that you'll probably find familiar. You can use builder lemmings to hack through any rock that's blocking your path to the exit, diggers to dig directly downwards, climbers to climb sheer walls and blockers that stop the lemmings behind it from taking a hazardous route to their deaths.

The Space and Medieval tribes meanwhile use variations of those skills.

Space lemmings can fire bazookas and use jet-packs, while the Medieval ones get Icarus wings and swords to smash through solid obstacles.

Levels are specially themed too, so you'll be dodging spaceship rays or firing your lemmings across moats, and that's what keeps Lemmings Tribes feeling fresh and breezy on mobile phone.

Of course, there are some minor inconveniences with playing the game on the small screen. In the heat of the moment when you're trying to get a blocker to stop five lemmings plunging to their deaths off a cliff, your fingers can become a bit knotted up.

Building a bridge on uneven terrain is a bit unwieldy too, due to not always being able to tell if it's lined up right.

But on the whole, Lemmings Tribes does a sterling job with its controls. You can scroll through the various skills using '#' and '*' then allocate them to a lemming by highlighting it with a cursor.

If things get too fraught, you can still allocate skills to various lemmings while the game is paused. Meanwhile, once everything is set up, you can fast-forward the level and watch your lemmings (hopefully) reach safety.

On a control-note, the game also supports touchscreen phones, which will no doubt make control a lot easier by letting you directly highlight skills then allocate them to lemmings with a quick tap.

All this aside, there's not much else about Lemmings Tribes that needs explaining. It comes with a more than ample 43 levels, which are unlocked as you go and gradually ramp up in difficulty.

Aside from a few that seemed unnecessarily awkward to complete, and the early ones being too easy, their design is solid and inventive throughout.

Of course, being an animal lover I can't condone Lemmings's perpetuating of the myth that lemmings are all stupid and will commit suicide wherever the opportunity arises. We should all know by now that the film showing them doing that was actually made by Walt Disney lining up turnstyles and firing them over the edge of a cliff.

But aside from lemming misrepresentation there's barely a reason not to check out Lemmings Tribes. This mobile game is every bit as playable as many of the console versions, which means it's puzzling gold.