Lemmings Touch

Having not grown up with Lemmings, I am often dismissed and ostracised by my contemporaries.

How could I have missed out on one of the most quintessentially British games of all time? Well, I was too busy playing Worms.

If you're in a similar boat, allow me to explain the fundamentals. You, the omnipotent player, are responsible for guiding a group of Lemmings from point A to B.

These lemmings are as mindless as the myth Disney Studios propagated back in the '50s. They need you to tell them when and where to build, bash, block, climb, dig, float, mine and, sometimes, explode.

All of these tasks are assigned via the touchscreen. This can be a little unwieldy at first.

Waiting for your lemming to reach the perfect location while hovering a flabby finger over the wheel of tasks can often result in the poor blighters digging down to their doom.

Alongside juggling on-the-fly lemming skill assignment, certain levels require you to manage platforms, lift crates, flip switches, or even aim trampoline trajectories.

You can pause the game by tapping the L trigger, but tasks can't be queued up while the game time is stopped. The R trigger speeds up game time. But overzealous use of fast-forwarding will have your lemmings plummeting off cliff edges before you know it.

Later on, a smattering of mischievous lemmings join the mix to muck things up. If they reach the goal, they'll sabotage it. In the meantime they can be assigned tasks just like any other lemming. It's up to you to exploit them until the very last moment.

In a similar fashion to Angry Birds, you'll be awarded up to three stars for each cleared stage. The result is based on how many lemmings you save, and how quickly you save them.

It's now possible to customise your lemmings by completing objectives and earning coins. These objectives range from simple tasks like making a lemming float for four seconds, to tougher challenges like sending a lemming back to the entrance of the level after almost reaching the exit. Goth rock lemmings The joy of Lemmings Touch is in its learning curve. The difficulty of the game never quite breaks you - it spurs you on to rethink your plan. There's always more than one way to save a lemming!

All the easy levels can be three-starred in one sitting, giving you an air of false confidence. There are 100 levels in all, with the tricky, taxing, and hard difficulties proving precisely as described.

As you travel through worlds of lava, lollipops, ice, and space, you'll hear an endless loop of modern reworkings of classical music. If a techno remix of Sugar Plum Fairy isn't up your alley, you might want to turn the music off in the menu options.

These lemmings are the cutest they've ever been. Each comment and cry is every bit as endearing as you'd expect. Even the loading screens are made slightly more bearable with simple, Penguin-bar-wrapper style jokes.

The touch controls, while not as accurate as a mouse, are mostly manageable.

Annoyingly, if too many lemmings are cramped together in a small area, it can be impossible to select the one you're after.

But if you do mis-touch, you can always enjoy the satisfying multi-pop of lemmings exploding after you unleash the pack-destroying nuke.

If you're a Lemmings veteran, Lemmings Touch packs in enough levels and new ideas to keep you soldiering through. For a newcomer to the series, I can't think of a better starting point.