Dyno Gems

It’s always the most harmless items that suck up all the space in a suitcase. Take clothes for instance.

Easy to hang up in a wardrobe leaving masses of room for shoes or other assorted knick-knacks at the bottom, dreadful for folding up and placing in a small space. Especially those damn jumpers that seem to fluff up to twice the size when folded.

Dyno Gems at first glance appears to be a familiar, cosy jumper of a game, ready to be nuzzled up to with its bright colourful graphics and a soundtrack that mainly consists of children shrieking with joy.

It’s only when you try and pack it into your phone that you realise it’s a vicious fluffy monster, weighing in at almost 10MB. Considering that most other matching titles on the Android Market are in the 1-3Mb range, it’s a bit of a shock to have this sprung on you.

Despite the relatively huge size, Dyno Gems is actually a fairly standard casual matching game, albeit with nicer graphics than most of the competition.

The aim of the game is to match four or more of the same coloured gem by sucking them from the board and shooting them back into place. The four gems only have to be touching to count and up to three of the same colour can be held in your dinosaur’s grubby mouth at a time.

This is all done by tapping the screen once to grab the blocks and double-tapping to fire them back out into the columns. You don’t have control of the prehistoric monster, but as long as the gems don’t descend further than his head at the bottom of the screen then there’s no need to worry about him too much.

What's more worrying is how the gems drop. Rather than using the standard, well-worn template of ‘quicker as you progress’, Dyno Gems has a tendency to spurt rows of the precious stones at you almost at random.

This strange pacing can lead to a perfectly easy part of the game suddenly becoming hell as three to four rows leap downwards in the space of one or two throws, before suddenly seizing up for a good half a minute to let you catch your breath.

Making things trickier are the controls, which work well for grabbing blocks but have a nasty habit of missing double-taps to throw. Combine with a sudden bout of gem-dropping and you’ve got the main reason for Game Over in Dyno Gems.

That being said, the game is still strangely absorbing. Whether it’s due to the in-your-face bright colourful graphics or the always-pleasing sound of children shouting for joy when you make a big match, it’s loud and happy enough to overcome some of the more troubling faults.

Just make sure you’ve taken out your apps and socks before you try and pack it into your phone.