Cloud Breaker

It was scarcely a month ago that I found myself reviewing a game called Cloudbreakers, so there was a brief moment of confusion when Cloud Breaker came down the tube.

But there's no connection between the two games at all. Cloudbreakers was easy on the eye and really quite kind to you.

Cloud Breaker, on the other hand, delights in handing your posterior to you - and then making you wait or pay for the privilege of going through it all again.

Somehow, though, that's not such a bad thing.

You could call Cloud Breaker a colour-matching puzzler, but it's nothing like the hordes of Bejeweled clones out there.

Each successive puzzle is relatively compact and usually solvable in several moves (often only one). You can take as many moves as you like, mind, and you can slide rows or individual blocks around at will in order to make the matches.

You will only form a match when every last block of a particular colour is clustered together. When this happens, though, all surrounding blocks will be sucked in together, leading to the potential for some easy chain reactions.

The matching itself is easy, then. It's the timer that will get you.

You see, you're on a timer that will tick on through each successive puzzle. Completion merely pauses this timer, and you seem to earn a few extra seconds by finishing a selection of ten.

But you will inevitably run out of time. At this point, your progress is recorded, and you get to go back and start it all again. The puzzles seem to be randomised, so you never have the same run twice.

You get a limited number of continues that enable you to have another crack starting from the world you're on. Oh, and you can buy more continues through an IAP.

Vapourware

While Cloud Breaker's core gameplay is fun, it's an undeniably sparse game. I mean that in terms of its stripped-back visuals, which have a certain airy charm to them (if you ignore the ugly fonts and menus).

But I mean that even more so in terms of the game's content. There's really not much to it beyond the repetitive grind of trying to beat your previous score.

There are no new skills to learn, no evolving puzzle structures... just a steady ticking down of the clock.

The sense of urgency is undeniably compelling, but it feels like Cloud Breaker is a bit too light on substance to warrant a place on your Most Played list.