Crushy Bricks review - A bit of a crushing disappointment

Crushy Bricks is a match-stuff puzzler with a twist. And that twist is at once infuriating and interesting. Unfortunately it's often far too close to infuriation for its own good though.

Rather than matching blocks in a grid, here they're in a pile. Match three or more and they'll disappear, and more blocks will drop in from above.

Using this simple idea you need to finish a bunch of challenges. But how long you stick with it depends how much of a glutton for punishment you are.

Whereas in games like Candy Crush you know how to get the special blocks that push you into the higher scores, here there doesn't seem to be any set way. They just pop up, or down, when they do.

That's not too annoying when you're in the early stages of the experience. But later on you need to use a certain number of them in order to complete a level.

When you've finished all the other aspects of a challenge and you're just sitting with crossed fingers waiting for a special block to turn up is when the ennui with the game's design is going to set in.

And it's a shame, because there are some really good ideas here. Bomb blocks need to be swiped away before they do any damage. Locked blocks have to be matched to get rid of them.

There are even concrete blocks that you need to drop to a specific place in the stack where they can be cleared away by pieces of machinery.

But when you're stuck on a level precisely because it's not giving you what you need to complete it, the rest of the experience just starts to feel unpleasantly hollow.

Where Crushy Bricks could have been a really intriguing new take on some well-word ideas, instead it pulls in the worst parts of the genre and cobbles them into an off-putting game of chance.

And once you've seen through that, it's highly unlikely that you're going to bother sticking with the game to see what else it has to offer.