Sexy Puzzle 2

Now that our leisure time can be filled with such delights as video games, DVDs, and the dozens of channels Freeview and Sky TV have to offer, simpler pastimes like jigsaw puzzles rarely get a look in, except perhaps during those despairing moments of the post-Christmas dinner lull.

Coming back to these older pleasures with Sexy Puzzle 2 has a sort of quaint feel to it, as if it recalls times gone by. It's a strange sensation to have when playing an adult game to be sure, a bit like a pair of edible undies that taste of Werther's Originals.

Naturally, the sexiness enters the equation through the picture that you're trying to make from various jigsaw puzzle pieces. The pictures are of the typical sort of young lady that frequents every adult game: mostly blonde, mostly busty, and at least reasonably beautiful.

The play screen is split into two main sections. The larger top section is the space you have at your disposal to put together the picture. Below this is a row of the available puzzle pieces. Both of these areas are scrollable, allowing for a puzzling area larger than the phone's screen.

Your cursor is a little hand that starts in the lower section, then flies up to the top once you have selected your puzzle piece. This mechanic works remarkably well, the scrolling giving the whole thing a quality that belies what many will have come to expect from a bog standard adult game.

Sexy Puzzle 2 offers three difficulty levels for each of the puzzle pictures that split the image into increasing numbers of pieces. Just as when doing a real world puzzle, you always end up starting with the corner bits and work your way in looking for landmark bits. Puzzles may not exactly be the latest fad in high-tech entertainment, but Sexy Puzzle 2 manages to make the experience surprisingly fun.

Unfortunately, you can't help but feel that the game is held back a little by the fact that it uses the adult pics. There's nothing wrong with the pictures themselves, and they are all of a decent quality, sporting good resolutions, but because light flesh tones tend to dominate all of them, the palette does get a little dull.

There's a definite sameness that creeps in fairly quickly. In every picture, there's a pretty girl on a largely nondescript background, and it all does get a little yawnsome.

There are not enough puzzles, either. Since there are only eight different pictures, each of which can be unlocked by completing the preceding puzzle on Easy mode, it's pretty easy to get to what's effectively the end of the game.

You can keep on playing the puzzles on the higher difficulty levels, but there's no proper game structure to encourage you to do so – you aren't given any extra credit for playing on higher difficulty levels and there's nothing left to unlock apart from the extra images. This, combined with the visual stagnancy, leads to playing on seeming a little pointless.

With such a solid basic game mechanics, it's a pity that more hasn't been made of the game. After a spruce up in the presentation department, mixed with a proper game structure and some non-porno pictures, Sexy Puzzle 2 could have been a real winner. But then it would be a different game.

Wishing for what isn't there is a bit of a pointless exercise, and while the game is fun for a while, there's not enough here to satisfy for more than a couple of fairly short gaming sessions.