Do Do Egg!

Somebody, somewhere, will have worked out the number of times the words “match”, “four”, and “puzzler” have appeared together in the description of a game on the App Store. It's probably well into the hundreds.

That's why your first glance at Do Do Egg! is so disheartening. You see brightly coloured shapes arranged in a grid, you see a timer in a corner and a bar along the bottom of the screen, and you think, "great, here we go again".

Then you try and connect four, and it doesn't work, and you realise you've judged a book by its cover. Shame on you.

Do Do Egg! is a puzzle game. It requires you to connect things, but it adds its own little twist to the genre that makes it worthy of a little bit more attention.

Rather than joining together strings of blobs, or eggs, of the same colour, you have to create chains that start and end with matching icons instead. You trace your chains across the screen with a finger, the eggs disappear, and more fall down to take their place.

Once you've knocked out a chain, you have a split second before the grid shuffles down to connect another one. As you progress through the game, you'll teach your fingers to swipe at lightning speed, creating four or five chains in the brief period between success and reorganisation.

There are five modes to play through, all of them offering slightly different variations on the same theme. The Normal and 1 Minute modes see you racing against the clock, whereas Endless, as you might expect, goes on forever.

Mission mode makes you perform specific tasks, starting chains with different coloured eggs or making a set number of chains in one move. Puzzle is the most original of the five, and changes the way the game plays significantly.

Rather than battling against time, you're presented with a smaller collection of eggs that you have to clear in the fewest moves. It's an interesting change of pace and requires more thought than reactions.

Do Do Egg! is an addictive, easy-to-learn and difficult-to-master sort of a game, although it isn't without its problems, chief amongst them being the way you have to pay for the different modes. Each of them costs the same again as the initial download.

It's an odd model, and one that makes the game far more expensive than it at first appears. There's still plenty of fun to be had from the basic package, but it's a shame that the whole experience is priced in a way that might put some people off.

Do Do Egg! is a refreshingly different puzzle game, one that plays around with the building blocks of the genre and creates an enjoyable package. Whether or not that package is worth the money depends on how desperate you are to try and connect things in a slightly different way.

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