Sexy Gems

It's perhaps a little odd how, in the mobile matching puzzler, the focus of your efforts is so often in matching precious gems – as in Bejeweled – or cute, lovely-looking things, as in Chuzzle. It's not as if you're really collecting the things. The tradition in the genre is for whatever you're matching to vanish away into the ether, only to be replaced by more of the same. It's enough to cause an existential crisis. Perhaps it would make more sense to match industrial waste products, discarded cans and oil slicks. Mind you, recipe for a green game as this might be, it probably wouldn't look too good on the screen.

Following in this tradition, Sexy Gems sees you matching rows of coloured gems in order to make them disappear, once again adopting the '…camel passing through the eye of the needle' approach to gem-collecting.

Since this is an adult title though, not all of its mechanics can be quite so godly. Finishing a level unlocks you some adult content. However, Sexy Gems is pushing the boundaries between saucy and what you might find in any women's clothing catalogue. There's little more flesh to be seen here than an exposed midriff, and if you've been enticed by the title, we can imagine you might be a little disappointed by what's on offer.

The gameplay is equally disappointing. Following the most basic of matching puzzler blueprints to the letter, you can move any column or row one square in each direction. It's a dynamic we know and have loved on many an occasion, but the execution of it here is so painfully dull and generic that the passing of levels soon turns into a dirge you can't help but stop caring about.

There are three game modes on offer – Normal Timed and Endless. The differences between them are minor. In Normal, you lose if there are no more moves available, in Timed you lose if you don't fill the progress bar quickly enough, and in Endless you simply don't lose. In every mode, you're working through the same levels, trying to fill a progress bar to the left of the game board. To add insult to incompetence, the concept of Normal mode is fatally flawed. How is it our fault if you can't make any more moves? It's the game that decides which new gems are added after each match anyway!

Piling on a further level of disappointment to Sexy Gems' CV, it doesn't even look good. The game board only takes up about half the screen, with the rest of it taken up by a half-naked, suggestively-posing blonde. Sure, she doesn't do anything and her presence is largely a mystery, but it's about the most hardcore thing in the game, so lap it up, sailor.

Sexy Gems is an unfailingly pedestrian title. Its two main elements – the game and the adult content – strive to cling onto mediocrity. But as you play on, that grip fails as Sexy Gems falls into a pit of coma-inducing, well, rubbishness.