Ozzy's Odyssey

A winning smile coupled with approachable presentation will open a lot of doors for you, even if, deep down, you're not as impressive as you'd like to think.

Ozzy's Odyssey trades on its good looks. It's a polished beast, gleaming with the cutesy hallmarks of the greatness it so desires.

But scratch away the surface and all is not as it should be.

The game is a puzzling platformer that sees you guiding a sweet little robot around a variety of levels, collecting batteries, avoiding nasty robots, and using your tractor beam to solve simple physics dilemmas.

Poor Ozzy can't jump like all the other platform heroes, though, so he has to use his all-powerful robot brain to work out how he's going to get where he wants to go.

That all-powerful robot brain is you. Tapping arrows at the left and right of the screen moves Ozzy in the corresponding direction, while you engage his minimalist tractor beam by tapping the button in the centre of the display.

There are nineteen levels in Ozzy's Odyssey to traverse and conquer, and to start off with, at least, they're a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, the easygoing logic that prevails during the opening stages of your adventure is quickly replaced by trial and error, repetition, and guesswork. What you have to do next isn't always obvious, and important parts of the level are sometimes obscured by scenery.

Ozzy's Odyssey isn't a bad game - the early levels are unquestionably a lot of fun, and the later ones certainly have their moments.

But as time goes by, it stops being a charming game about a lovable robot, and starts becoming a frustrating game about glaring errors in level design.

Charm will carry you a long way in life, but if you put the special blue box the player needs to continue in a place it's impossible to see, then all the charisma and pizzazz in the world isn't going to save you.