Flipside

Bringing something new to the match-three genre is no easy task. So numerous are these gem-matching, ball-busting puzzlers that you couldn't be blamed for rearranging a supermarket's canned food into neat lines of three in a daze of over-exposure.

Apparently, making my match-ups disappear by slipping them into my pocket was the final straw.

While calling it revolutionary would be a slight exaggeration, Flipside makes a commendable effort at invention in the crowded match-three genre in the form of dual-sided tiles. The fact that tiles have a different shape on each side has an enormous impact on gameplay, rocketing this otherwise commonplace puzzler to attention.

Like any match-three puzzle game, your goal lies in lining up tiles to form trios that vanish from the screen. Put together enough matches to fill up the points gauge and move you forward to the next level.

The only options available to you involve sliding tiles into empty spaces or tapping them to flip them over. Five shapes plaster the front side of every tile (star, diamond, cross, circle, and heart), while colour coding allows you to gauge the shape on the other side of a tile.

With new tiles falling from the top and additional ones popping up should you perform a bad match, the pressure is on to try and clear enough of the board from the word go, each new level upping the intensity.

It's taking on a rival - whether via Bluetooth or simply a computer-controlled character - that really pushes Flipside to new heights. Your foe actually plays using the shapes on the other side of the tiles. Played in real-time, this is a free for all where every move you make affects your rival and vice versa.

Indeed, where Flipside actually falls down a little is in its single player Puzzle mode. You're presented with a set number of tiles to be cleared from the screen. It's a tedious affair, and as the puzzles advance just getting beyond the first couple of moves without making a mistake is increasingly difficult.

Even worse, there's no way of knowing whether you've done so until you reach the end without a match-up in sight.

As a whole, Puzzle mode doesn't slot in neatly with the rest of game. It's questionable just how much of your time Flipside will dissolve in the long-run as a result, but its fresh take on what is a competitive category is likely to ensure that it turns heads longer than some of its rivals.