Happy Lines

Lines aren't often happy things. Our experience in the queue for the supermarket checkout this morning stands as testament (and who knew that an expertly wielded cucumber could be such an effective deterrent?).

No, usually lines are impatient, ill-tempered things. So it won't come as a shock to find that Happy Lines doesn't focus on the battle to keep your groceries on the conveyor belt from being impinged upon by the loud woman behind you.

Instead, it stars little coloured balls who're rather upset. The androgynous orbs have been split up from their friends and family and desire just one thing: that they be reunited. Like a modern-day Cilla Black, it's up to you to slide isolated balls into contact with their similarly-hued brood.

You do this by selecting the ball that you want to move and then selecting the square on the grid that you'd like to move it to. The only restriction placed on you is that the route between the ball and its prospective new square is clear and that it's either straight up or down, or left or right.

When you've aligned five balls of the same colour or gathered a group of four together in a square, they disappear. This serves two purposes: it opens up space in the grid and fills up the time bar at the bottom of the screen. The former is important because after every move you make, three new balls materialise in the grid. The time bar, meanwhile, is both your enemy and your friend; gradually decreasing to act as a time limit, if you manage to fill it you'll complete the level.

It's a tricky challenge and, with the new balls appearing on such a regular basis, it'll be a fair few goes before you even get off the first level. It really is that hard and unless you're concurrently working on forming two or three lines of the same colour at once, you'll quickly be swamped.

Mind you, you'll need to be flexible, as when a new ball emerges into view, smack bang where you were going to move the fifth and final ball into a row, you'll have to think quickly.

Happy Lines requires players of a certain mindset. It's certainly not as intuitive a puzzle game as current sphere-shifting favourite, Chuzzle, demanding a fair investment of time before it becomes properly fun and enjoyable. But it does have something else on its side: variation.

You'll soon encounter grids that are anything but square and you'll sometimes be limited as to what conglomerations of balls you're allowed to make. On top of that, a fifth colour on top of the standard four adds further to the difficulty.

And, while the Progress mode simply requires you to fill the time bar, the Arcade mode sets challenges that must be fulfilled in order for you to progress. Annoyingly, the objectives of each level can be vague – you might not be sure what it is you're trying to do until you've done it – and the lack of any kind of tutorial doesn't help.

The control system isn't terribly friendly, either – instead of pressing a cursor up and down each square when you want to move a ball, an extending line (like the aiming aid in a snooker game) terminating at the appropriate spot would have made playing for longer much easier.

As it is, Happy Lines is a tough and long-lived proposition that'll keep you puzzling for longer than most of its contemporaries. Granted, it's not as much fun as the likes of Chuzzle, but it's accomplished in its own way.