My Little City

Upon booting up My Little City, you'd be forgiven for thinking that you had just installed a run-of-the-mill resource-management title.

You are presented with a square of land divided into four sections, and instructed to develop each section by gathering the appropriate building materials.

However, when you click to gather your first batch of bricks or cluster of trees you'll find yourself staring at an oddly familiar sight: an 8x8 grid filled with coloured icons.

A few button taps later, you realise that you've just downloaded yet another match-three puzzler.

In theory, the idea of merging of a city-builder with a colour-matching puzzler is not an inherently bad one.

While the meat of the game consists of the standard tile-arranging fare, the desire to see your city grow (and your world ranking increase) serves as an incentive to push forward.

To that end, you must upgrade each of the four sections - Businesses, Industry, Community, and Houses - one by one to unlock the next shopping mall or tenement block, until you've nurtured a thriving metropolis.

Or, at least, that's the idea. In practice, My Little City falls down on a number of counts. For starters, the resources are represented on the grid by extremely small, overly complicated symbols.

While your eyes do become accustomed to distinguishing between two different grey squiggles, you'll be yearning for the clarity of Bejeweled's distinct symbols.

More problematic than the icons, though, is the difficulty. After the very first round the game starts demanding large numbers of resources, numbers that seem wildly out of synch with the tiles onscreen.

You'll likely find yourself repeating levels with unreasonable regularity, timing out again and again as you wait for the game to produce an arrangement of resources capable of generating a victory.

As the type and number of resources required to earn a particular structure are randomised - and can vary wildly from turn to turn - there's no chance to establish any tactics beyond 'try and try again'.

Even the victories feel cheap - usually the result of a sudden avalanche of offscreen tiles tumbling onto the grid and producing a series of matches while you sit passively and watch.