Pocket Land

Contrary to what sniffy gaming types will tell you, graphics do matter. In fact, they're essential.

Take your favourite iOS game of recent times and swap out the artwork and animation with crude placeholder blocks and I guarantee your enjoyment will be all but ruined.

In Pocket Land we have a working example of this, as it effectively takes Triple Town and does just that.

Yes, this is another of those thoughtful match-three strategy games, whereby you match multiple low-level elements in a bid to form better elements, which in turn can be matched to create even better elements, and so on.

Once again, the key is in forward-planning and reading the game board so as not to jam it up with wasted tiles.

The trouble with Pocket Land is that it looks a complete mess. Rather than the cute bears and sharply drawn castles of Triple Town (or any of its many well-polished clones), here we have the most rudimentary of interactive objects.

It's as if the developer has literally copied and pasted basic texture images onto the playing tiles and signed them off as done.

It's not just that this makes Pocket Land feel ugly and unfinished - though it is both of things - it's that you can't instinctively engage with its world or its fiction. There's no sense of investment.

The lack of differentiation also makes it trickier to play. Try as I might, I just couldn't get my head around positioning two bland, nondescript patches of grass in order to make bushes in order to make a trees, and so on.

Pocket Land is a structurally competent match-three puzzler, but it's wholly lacking in the polish and charm that is so vital to such games.