Twinkled

The worst things on the Android Market aren't anything to do with the endless flood of sliding-block puzzles knocked up in five minutes to con the gullible into clicking on their banner ads.

The really frustrating releases are those games where developers clearly had a good idea at some stage, and got some reasonably talented people to help them out, but just didn't think the whole thing through.

Revaler's Twinkled is one of these, a casual time-waster in which you have to rebuild constellations by stopping wandering stars in the right places before the time limit runs out.

Twinkled looks all right, and set down on paper the basic idea seems sound enough. But the end result is dragged down by any number of nitpicks: the only reason you can imagine anyone didn't fix them was because doing so would have meant admitting their game wasn't really that much fun.

What you have to do in Twinkled to 'rebuild constellations' is tap on the stars crawling across the screen when they pass over particular target points in the sky.

You can't directly influence where the stars are going (in fact, for the first couple of levels you've got no control at all). Tap on a star when it's outside any target point and you lose it. Lose all your stars or fail to fill all the target points before the time runs out and you have to start again.

You could, in theory, get a decent enough game out of this idea, but Twinkled simply is not that game.

As with so many other throwaway smartphone puzzlers around, it just begs the question - why would anyone choose to play this? Even if they really like astronomy, it'd be stretching things a bit.

Back to the game. The target points fade in and out, and there's nothing in the background to show you where the stars are meant to go, so you're essentially being asked to memorise the constellation.

This simply isn't much fun when you're also trying to keep track of up to ten little points of light slowly bouncing around the screen, and you have to stop the stars precisely inside the target – which is tiresome in the extreme even when you can see where you're aiming.

Later levels introduce black holes to make the stars change course, but this only makes things worse. Double-tapping places a black hole, but tap even close to a star and Twinkled assumes you wanted to hit it.

You're meant to tap the black hole to turn it off and release the stars, but this means your finger blocks your view of where they'll go next.

The whole thing just lacks polish. The touchscreen controls are unresponsive, there's an annoying audio bug if you restart a level with a black hole active, there are spelling mistakes in many of the text boxes, and most of the messages Twinkled throws at you are annoyingly pointless.

Kids and astronomy buffs might like the trivia, but the gameplay tips are patronising at best. Seeing "You must save all the stars" is the kind of thing that'll leave you grinding your teeth after failing the level for the tenth time in a row. Really? Is that what I'm supposed to be doing?

Despite some attractive visuals, Twinkled is underdeveloped, uninteresting, and far too dependent on luck.