Implode!

Pack a game with TNT and people are going to expect something explosive.

Implode!, though solely concerned with smashing structures to pieces by planting charges, doesn't fit that description.

In fact, rather than a fiery affair, IUGO Entertainment's physics puzzler would be better described as merely 'functional'.

The problem is that Implode! shares its sub-genre with colourful, cute, cartoony games like Angry Birds, Siege Hero, and Land-a Panda.

In comparison, Implode!'s stripped back, no-nonsense approach feels agonisingly archaic.

Not that any of this is evident from the word 'go'. Indeed, like the vast majority of its brethren, much of Implode!'s opening feels like a glorified tutorial, teaching you the dos and don'ts of its deconstructive play.

But that doesn't take too long. The idea behind every level in Implode! is to bring down a simplistic structure made of a series of posts and planks.

To do so, you need place explosives in what you deem their weak points, dragging your ammunition onto the map with your finger before pushing down the lever and letting the foundations fly.

Implode! doesn't allow you to destroy its frameworks willy nilly, however. Success means flooring the structures below a predetermined line, often – in levels later on – without letting them crash into whole sectors of the map on the way down.

As well as upping the ante somewhat, by cordoning off areas Implode! subtly guides you to play as the developer wants you to.

Indeed, it's a testament to the authenticity of the game's physics engine that even moving just one explosive by a fraction can cause the structure to come down in a completely different way.

On the flip side, however, that also means that even after sessions of healthy experimentation you find yourself targeting the same old areas level after level.

Even without realising it, you'll learn Implode!'s shorthand especially quickly, and with only a moment's glance you'll determine just which parts to blow up based on all that's gone before.

Some might argue that this predictability is a testament to Implode!'s fundamental solidity. It doesn't leave you high and dry, imparting the principles of structural theory almost on the quiet.

And this might be true, but the result is a game that never gets going.

Implode! is constantly threatening to spark into something quite frenzied, but its fuse simply runs and runs.

What makes this even more unacceptable is that IUGO's Windows Phone version comes almost two years to the day after the same misdemeanors were made on iPhone – there's been no attempt made to sex up the gameplay, or build on its existing structure in any way.

Just as the implosion is the less exciting cousin of the explosion, Implode! lacks the thrill of many of its genre stablemates, even if it is fundamentally solid.