Puzzle Blox

Some of life’s most mundane problems would be made much easier if you could just flip the world round 90 or 180 degrees. Keys lost down a drain? No problem. Spouse/kids/sibling refusing to get out of bed? See how comfortable they find the ceiling.

Puzzle Blox adds a similarly useful twist to an otherwise rather run of the mill match-three puzzler.

At its heart, Puzzle Blox is a fairly standard - if neatly executed - puzzler in the mould of RealNetworks’s Collapse series. Like that franchise, the idea is to rid the game field of coloured tiles by removing blocks of three or more of any one colour.

The twist, as suggested in the intro, is that you can influence the game field by tilting the handset, which alters the pull of gravity accordingly and shifts the blocks in a new direction. It really does add a touch of spice to each of the three game modes on offer.

Arcade is the standard high-score attacking mode, which bears some resemblance to Tetris. Rows of random coloured blocks keep dropping ever faster from the top of the screen, making it tougher and tougher for you to whittle the field down.

I found Puzzle mode to be incredibly tough - even on Easy - as it requires you to rid full screens of blocks in an extremely short time limit. This is by far the most taxing mode, and is one for the hardcore puzzle fans among you.

Finally, Challenge mode is probably the most immediate and best fun of the three. You’re set a series of micro tasks, such as finding a way to manoeuvre four green blocks into position where they can be deleted together.

This mode really relies heaviest on the accelerometer element as the main means of control, and it comes across as the freshest way to play the game as a result.

While Puzzle Blox is hardly the most original puzzler I’ve ever played, it’s very good at what it sets out to do. Its three modes of play are sufficiently varied to promote repeat play, and the inclusion of online high score tables is always a welcome feature.

Ultimately, though, it’s the accelerometer-based twist that leaves the strongest impression, and makes the game worthy of consideration ahead of many other me-too efforts.