Flipped Out - Powerpuff girls powering and puffing and just being amazing

I'll be honest, I did a bit of a groan when I heard there was a Powerpuff Girls match-three puzzler coming out. Nothing like a generic matcher to really grind an interesting franchise into the dust.

Oh but how wrong I was. This is a game that plays around with the puzzler genre in fun and exciting ways. So fun and exciting in fact, that sometimes it becomes a touchscreen brawler.

It's polished, it's funny, and it utilises some of the functions of your mobile or tablet in pretty ingenious ways.

Well for starters you can flip your device around. Hold it in portrait mode and you play the puzzle section of the game, hold it in landscape and you play the brawler. There are some monsters that need to be flipped if you want to fight them.

Then there's the puzzling itself. You're not just moving things around a grid. Instead you're swiping one of the three titular heroes around, barging them into monsters in an attempt to push them into groups of three or more.

You can swipe in a variety of angles, push monsters off one side of the screen only for them to bounce back on the other, and use special moves to create chains of destruction.

But if the matches are thin on the ground you can flip your phone and punch everything to death instead. The fighting is automatic, but you can swipe your characters around and use different powers to smash down the health bars of your foes.

There's an RPG element here as well. You earn stickers as you fight, and putting these on the back of the girl's phones gives them extra powers. You've only got limited space though, and some of the stickers are larger than others.

Throw in boss fights, fourth-wall breaking villains, and creatures you can only defeat in one of the modes, and you're left with a mobile game that's not afraid to do things differently.

I will do that, even though it sounds like nonsense. It's fair to say that Flipped Out is a massive surprise, both in terms of quality, style, and mechanics.

Everything it does it does brilliantly, all of the new things it tries come off brilliantly, and the fact it tries them is remarkably refreshing.

If you're only going to spend money on one game this week, then I'd suggest buying this. It's fast, it's fresh, and it's a ridiculous amount of clever fun.