X-mas Puzzle

The tradition for television shows to serve up special festive editions is fairly well established, but until the likes of Angry Birds came along, seeing your favourite game characters pop on a Santa hat in time for Christmas was a fairly rare event.

X-mas Puzzle might not be an officially sanctioned Christmas edition of Bejeweled, but it's certainly how it portrays itself, calling on the kinds of moves every match-three fan will be well versed in.

The only major difference is that instead of swapping gems around you're piecing together presents and candy sticks.

Chain gang

Coming with two short and sweet modes, the basic principles of X-mas Puzzle aren't hard to master. Presented with an 8x8 grid filled with various different symbols and shape, your job is to switch them around to make matching lines of three or more.

Only shapes next to each other can be swapped and, unlike in plenty of other match-threes, diagonal lines count as well. As such, it's fairly easy to get a chain going, with the new shapes that pile in at the top of the map often falling straight into a combo with no effort on your part.

This is particularly helpful in the game's first mode – Twix – where your only goal is to clear a set number of shapes from the board before the clock counts you out.

To start with, X-Mas Puzzle gives you 20 seconds a turn to make a match, with every level that follows knocking more seconds off the clock.

Not so fair and square

The second mode, dubbed Square, swaps hitting a set number of matches with making sure you clear shapes from each and every square on the grid. The clock, as before, brings play to a close should you not manage it.

And, in truth, failure is quite possible given that there seems to be little structure to the new additions that drop into play.

While Bejeweled has a knack for stretching out the initial stages to make sure you stay on board, X-mas Puzzle presses the randomiser on the word 'go'. As such, failure in the first round often seems inevitable.

Add in the fact that this all seems rather familiar, and X-Mas Puzzle soon begins to feel like the ultimate Christmas faux-pas: the present you've already received, several times before.