Revolution

To run "like clockwork" is rapidly becoming one of those phrases in the English language that mean little in the modern world.

Where once every machine had some form of gears and levers clanking away, rotating various cogs and flinging wooden cuckoos out of small doors, now they’re more likely to have transistors, capacitors and soldered circuit boards doing the job instead.

While circuit boards have made for some fairly diverting puzzles in the past, it’s the glory days of machines that Revolution focuses on. Each screen poses the question of how to get an unfinished contraption moving again.

The tools at your disposal are a limited selection of different sized cogs that must be dragged up from the bottom bar and fitted carefully between the existing pieces (in as far as gravity will permit).

Every level begins with one cog on screen already turning, with the idea being that through a combination of head-scratching puzzling and careful, pin-point precision, everything on screen starts turning.

Place a cog so that it starts turning in two separate directions though, and the whole contraption jams, meaning carefully picking your place - especially on the later puzzles - becomes just as important as which size to employ.

It’s in the pacing of these puzzles where Revolution shines. The easy tutorial stages blossom into some tricky as hell levels over the course of the game so smoothly and consistently, that it becomes very hard to put the handset down.

There are annoyances, though, that prevent Revolution from being up there with the best puzzlers the platform has to offer.

The placement of the pieces is extremely picky, resulting in contraptions that are often fractions of a millimetre in the wrong place and require a complete restart to correct.

There’s also one of the most unforgiving move counters I’ve encountered in recent memory, which penalises the player for merely selecting a piece - you don’t even have to place it anywhere.

This may not prove too big an issue to some, but for people who want to ‘Gold medal’ every stage, it feels unnecessarily harsh.

If, however, you want a simple but elegantly paced game that runs like clockwork, then Revolution should slot comfortably into your Windows Phone games collection.