Tidy Monsters review - Match three with a twist

Tidy Monsters is a game about tidying up after yourself. It's ostensibly a match-three puzzler, albeit one with a slightly more tactile twist than you might be used to.

Rather than just popping gems that appear next to each other or shuffling them around, here you're dragging objects into a tray at the bottom of the screen and then swiping it away when it's full.

It's a neat enough idea, but it never really gets going beyond that initial spark of ingenuity. It's good, but it won't manage to hold your attention for all that long.

The game takes place in a messy bedroom. Toys of various shapes and sizes fall down from the top of the screen. You need to drag them to a box at the bottom of the screen and deposit them there.

Place three of the same item in the box and you can swipe it away, earning some points and giving you another box to try and fill up.

If you add a different object to the box though, it'll empty and everything contained within will drop back onto the screen, leaving you with more problems to deal with.

You need to put a set number of specific toys and objects away to move on to the next level. You don't need to focus on them exclusively, but the game usually chucks a lot of them at you in a short time.

There's also a spider rattling about the place. And if that drops into your basket it's game over. It adds a slight layer of tactics to the game, but more often than not you don't really have any control as to whether the arachnid drops.

The other way you can lose is if the screen gets too full. There's a red line at the top, and if objects stay over that for too long then you lose. You can buy power-ups with the coins you collect, but they don't do much to change the beat of play.

And that's about it really. Where other match-stuff puzzlers evolve over time, giving you different things to do, Tidy Monsters is happy to sit in its slightly different rut.

There's fun to be had, and there's a nice art style too, but you're going to lose interest pretty quickly. This isn't a bad game, but it rests on its laurels far too quickly, and that spells death in a crowded mobile market.