CrossRoad

CrossRoad is hard, hard work. Like those temporary part-time jobs we've all taken just to earn a bit of spare cash it appears simple, but ends up being tricky to master.

Beginning with the basic concept of pushing a series of two or more matching coloured blocks together, CrossRoad rapidly becomes a full cranial work-out. You always know what needs to be done - the tricky part is figuring out how to achieve it.

In the game you control Cory, a witch capable of pushing coloured blocks to clear them from various grids. Pushing matching cubes together eliminates them from the board. A digital D-pad triggered whenever your finger touches the screen allows you to move Cory. You can prompt her to shove cubes in any direction merely by giving her a short, sharp tap.

Tapping can also flip grid squares over, turning them either from impenetrable black squares that act as walls to plain old white ones or vice versa. Doing so relies on them being next to a starred square, however. These squares come labeled with a set number of stars that correspond to the number of neighbouring squares along either a vertical or horizontal line they can flip.

Though many of the early levels require minimal flipping, it becomes increasingly important as you advance. The aim is to either clear a path for one of your cubes to travel down or trap it with a black square so you can match it up at a later point.

Every map you play is best handled by first surveying the flippable squares on offer, using them to manipulate both the movement of CrossRoad's wee, sweet protagonist and the cubes she's so intent on shoving around.

That's not to say that the game is tied down by a one-solution-fits-all mentality. With most of the biggest puzzles, there are numerous ways to clear all the cubes.

Handing over your iPhone to a friend for a bash will pay dividends, different moves entirely coming together to solve the puzzle in a variety of ways. It's the kind of unique appeal that means a day, a week or a month later you can come back to the same maps and tackle them in a totally different way.

The game's stripped down look does enable the action to kick off immediately, with no tutorial or fussy text pop-ups interrupting your first steps. You essentially find your own way, the only help being a demo mode that kicks in before the title sequence if left untouched.

Such a set-up does run the risk of alienating newcomers who lack the patience to see it through unaided, but it's a refreshing change not to have your hand held at every stage. Like classic games from ten or twenty years ago, part of taming this beast comes from learning how to play it in the first place.

And that's CrossRoad in a nutshell: refreshing. Ideal for a five minute fix or manic marathon, Shalala Studio has managed to bring a flow of new blood to the puzzler. Some might say that's as hard a task as the one CrossRoad poses in itself.