Sex Bomb!

Just as, for most people, the idea of Tom Jones swaggering around a stage these days, like an arthritic welsh zombie, singing 'Sex Bomb' is not a particularly enticing prospect, Sex Bomb! has naturally some way to go to convince us that the titular exclamation mark is really necessary, or indeed the 'bomb'.

As might be expected, Sex Bomb! falls at this first hurdle. Sure, there are occasionally bombs involved in the gameplay, but nowhere near enough to justify the title.

It may be a petty and pedantic point to make, but if a game title automatically raised expectations that are never going to be fulfilled outside the context of the malaise that infects the world of adult content, a fuss would soon be made. In short: no, this is not Bomberman.

After that aside, it's a good job that Sex Bomb! is fun enough to be forgiven. It's a matching puzzler, but not of the traditional falling blocks type. The coloured balls you're matching do still fall from the top of the screen, but you're matching them on a circular spindle in the centre of the screen. The balls stick to this, and you can rotate the spindle in order to vicariously direct the balls.

The balls don't automatically match-up on contact. Instead, there's a radar-like spinning arm that moves around the screen. Once this comes into contact with the matched-up balls, they disappear. The radar arm disappears temporarily while you're spinning the central spindle, allowing you to pile-up combos - when you get used to the game at least.

There's also a number of power-ups introduced over the 12 levels of the Main game mode: ones that freeze the radar, ones that increase your rotational speed and, yes, the bombs that the title promises. In the main game mode, each level is completed by performing enough matches to fill a progress bar at the bottom of the screen.

The Puzzle mode doesn't change the core dynamics, but in each level here there's a number of balls already in play, and you need to get rid of them all. If the balls collected on the spindle reach out too near the edge of the screen, it's game over, so puzzle mode gets fairly tricky towards the end, where the screen is virtually filled from the outset.

Sex Bomb! calculates the time spent throughout the levels in Puzzle mode, so rather than a high score, you're measured on how quickly you can complete the whole mode. Finishing a level in either mode unlocks a quarter of one of the six included adult images. Once you've unlocked the whole picture, it's viewable from the gallery, which you'll find in the main menu.

It's a pity that the Main game mode is so short and lacking in any sense of a remotely challenging difficulty curve. The Puzzle mode's piling-on of balls isn't enough to compensate for this, unfortunately, with levels whose arrangements you can literally predict before they appear.

Although the Main mode ramps up the amount of balls you need to collect as you progress, even a fairly casual player will probably be able to breeze through without much threat.

This is the one of the few things stopping the game from squaring-up to its non-adult big brothers, which isn't bad going for a game that's going to be largely relegated to 18+ categories.