Yumsters

In a few years' time, when we're all walking around in silver spacesuits, using hoverboards to beat the early morning rush hour, and basically living our lives as foretold in Back to the Future 2, we'll look back at the swish mobile games we're playing today and view them as little more than primitive experiments.

So sophisticated will be the wealth of entertainment on offer in this utopian future that even the likes of Infinity Blade will appear visually crude, while Angry Birds will...well, let's face it, we'll probably all still be playing Angry Birds.

Still, if you're wondering how it might feel to look back on the current big hitters in these years to come, then a quick blast on Yumsters will give you a good impression.

Here's a game that was no doubt good once, but now feels hopelessly out of its time.

That's probably because Yumsters, in some form or other, has been doing the rounds for some time now, and the principles behind its gameplay haven't changed a bit.

The idea is to match up a series of different worms – or, presumably, Yumsters – with the fruit that matches their colour.

Said worms live in holes that run along the top and bottom of a grid, while the fruit itself appears at random – sometimes alone, or sometimes in lines – in the grid that sits in the middle of the stage.

It's then your job to pick up each Yumster's head (moving a cursor around the stage with the number keys) and drag it across to any matching fruit within range.

Each worm's neck then extends out as far as you need as he happily munches away on both the fruit at the end of the line and any other his frame touches along the way.

There are, of course, rules to complicate affairs.

If there's any non-matching fruit in the way, your Yumster won't extend, and it's not possible for their necks to cross, meaning you have to decide which fruit to eat first to free up the rest of the board.

You can also swap the positions of the worms themselves, dropping their heads into any of the other holes to enable them to reach fresh parts of the map.

Yet, just like the Android release before it, Yumsters still drags. The worms take so long to munch away, that you simply end up twiddling your thumbs waiting for them to finish before you can move on.

It's no doubt an intentional pause, but in an age where its rivals - namely the scores of match-three puzzlers – play at a sometimes dazzling pace, Yumsters feels archaic in comparison.

There are bonuses on offer later on that speed up their digestion, and Yumsters goes on to feature various pests that have to be dealt with - namely insects that threaten to spoil the fruit - but the whole affair is never especially exciting.

Even Yumsters with special abilities (such as bending around corners or detonating fruit in the immediate area at the end of each meal) fail to lift the structure of play sufficiently.

The idea behind it remains solid, and it's possible a developer approaching it from a fresh angle could breathe some life into its setup. But as it stands Yumsters is far too pedestrian to cement a place for itself in history.