Pokemon Link: Battle!

Pokemon Link: Battle! is the downloadable sequel to Pokemon Link! / Pokemon Trozei! on the original DS. It's a fast-paced puzzle game that will be very familiar to anyone who has ever played a match-three puzzler.

Which, after the success of Candy Crush Saga, is pretty much everybody.

However, it puts enough of a spin on the concept to feel fresh, and it ties in with the Pokemon licence well too, making it a worthwhile time-waster for both puzzle fans and Pokemaniacs alike.

You're presented with a large grid, upon which are placed icons containing cartoonish representations of the heads of various Pokemon. When you tap, hold, and drag your stylus from one icon to another, the two icons swap places. You can do this with any two icons on the board.

Your task is to match three or more of the same icon, which then removes them from play, with more icons falling from the top of the screen to take their place. As soon as a connection is made, a short timer ticks down, and if you manage to make another connection before time runs out you begin a combo.

Making lots of these connections gives you points to capture the Pokemon sat at the top of the screen that you're battling. Whittling their health down to zero like this is easy at first, but after a few Zones you start to encounter tougher adversaries.

Bosses can drop down from their starting positions, smashing into the board and taking up residence there, which in turn gives you less room to make connections.

Though you'll generally have plenty of similar Pokemon icons on the screen at once, sometimes a Wild Pokemon will appear that you'll need to match with a Ditto quickly, or it'll just sit there taking up valuable space.

You have special abilities of your own to help you progress, of course. Link Chance lets you get away with only matching two icons at a time, instead of the usual three, and is activated by matching four icons in a combo then immediately making a match of three.

On a similar theme, when you run up against a horde of Pokemon, matching five icons at once will spread the damage out among all your enemies rather than concentrating your attack on one.

The element system from the main Pokemon games is present, meaning that if you match fire-type pokemon at the beginning of a combo, your attacks will be strong against leaf-type and weak against water-type.

It's neatly but simply presented, so while it lacks much in the way of style, the play area is clear. Combined with the intuitive controls, it makes for a much faster match-three experience than you might be expecting.

It's a pleasing change of pace, and it stops the process of repeating stages to collect all the Pokemon in the Pokedex becoming a chore.

Pokemon Link: Battle! isn't the most inventive puzzle game from Nintendo, but it's different enough from the throng of competitors to justify its existence, and it has a plethora of content and plenty of replay value to boot.