AstroPop

Nope, it's not Marvin the Martian's favourite tipple, nor is it Russell Grant's idea of scaling the music charts. What we have in AstroPop is an old-fashioned, old-skool, ye olde, (vintage), injection of puzzling fun into a pocket gaming puzzle world that's seemingly fascinated with updating aging concepts with glittery visuals. Absent this time are the thousands of onscreen colours, high definition visuals, and Bluetooth compatibility. In is the unfettered fun-filled world of AstroPop.

The object is to guide your chosen character – Vector, Sprocket or the brilliantly named Turbot – to match up rows of coloured bricks in order to make them disappear. You do this from within your AstroPilot, a spaceship like a flying crane, lifting blocks up from one column and then dropping them on top of another. By clearing all the pieces you're able to progress onto the more varied and ultimately harder levels, while super bricks, invincible bricks and common, everyday explosive bricks are thrown in for good measure. The latter add a bit of variety, though they are few and far between, introducing a cliff-hanger element into the game as you wait for one to appear.

There are two main modes of play in AstroPop, Classic and Survival. Classic sees you gaining as much power as possible on your 'brick-o-meter' by making bricks disappear. Once it's filled, you can move up a level. Survival is a more straightforward affair, seeing you amass as many points as you can before getting stuck with a screen full of bricks. If you do well there are a handful of bonus rounds to have a go at too, and these make for a nice break in the gameplay. Additionally, each character has their own special weapon to help get you out of awkward situations. These include plasma cannons, neutron pulses and fusion warheads (they're not quite as spectacular as they sound).

Controlling your ship is very straightforward, with just the four directions on your handset's thumbpad needed to control everything, and this helps pace the game nicely, making AstroPop feel very natural to play. The only limit really is how well your brain keeps up – spotting places to remove and then drop coloured bricks takes a bit of working out, especially at speed, but it makes for a very engrossing experience.

AstroPop's difficulty is pitched about right too, meaning each level offers you a fair bit of work to do, but without leaving you struggling for hours trying to crack it. The presentation is solid throughout, with simple but crisp and functional graphics. The sound is also very simple, but as a sideline to the gameplay this is forgivable.

AstroPop is certainly not an earth-shattering experience that has appeared as though from the mind of a genius. But it is good fun, relatively original, and more engaging than many of the other colour-matching games out there.