Stones of Khufu

Considering the ample stock of block based mobile games, you could be forgiven for thinking that there's not too much room for originality in the genre.

After all, once you've dropped them in Tetris, stacked them in TowerBloxx, and smashed them in Blockbreaker Deluxe, what's left to do but create a pale imitation of one of those titles?

The surprisingly simple answer, according to RealArcade's latest release, is to slide them, and the result is another cracking puzzler from the self-styled pharoahs of casual gaming.

The story behind Stones of Khufu revolves around two cursed mummy twins trying to escape their tombs before the sun rises. As is often the way with curses, the method of progression is somewhat obtuse, requiring the brothers to hurl coloued blocks into the dingy tombs in order to make connected groups of three or more. When this achievement falls beneath the circling gaze of the 'divine ray' that sweeps the screen every few seconds, the blocks magically disappear. Manage to remove all the blocks of a particular colour and that hue will be banished. Remove all the colours and you're onto the next level.

Although complex to explain, this procedure is actually relatively intuitive and simple in practice. Or at least it would be, if it wasn't for two slight complications designed to increase the challenge.

Firstly, there's the slightly annoying factor that the brothers are locked in diametric opposition to each other (part of the curse apparently) so whenever one fires off a block, the other simultaneously slides one, often of a different colour, from the other direction.

Secondly, there's the actual game grid to contend with, which is not only littered by an inconvenient mess of coloured blocks, but also a host of ruins and even scarab beetles that conspire to thwart your plans.

The resulting challenge is taxing, and a tight time limit (curse subclause 2.1b) and some increasingly fiendish level design means you have to think fast and laterally if you want to progress.

Fortunately, the controls don't add to the challenge, enabling you to both rotate and rapidly switch the brothers with both joystick and number pad.

Visually, though not quite as charming as some previous Real outings or the likes of Tower Bloxx, Stones of Khufu is clear enough, and enhanced by some perky in-game sound effects too (we particularly liked the swish of the sliding blocks), if not the haunting (read grating) theme tune.

In truth, our only significant grumble with Stones of Khufu is the fact that the action ends too soon. Although 40 levels may sound substantial (especially as you'll doubtless get stumped by a few of them), the fact that most last less than a minute means that you can play through the whole game in an hour or two.

A Survival mode should add a further hour or so of return trips, but it isn't compelling enough to keep you coming back after that.

Two to three hours of play isn't crippling for a fine £5-ish mobile game, and you could argue that Stones of Khufu has been cursed by its own sheer addictiveness. But the lack of longevity is enough to cut the game short of legendary status.