X-Men: Genetix

Deep in the city of lost souls, down the high street of despair, wedged in between the poundshop of lame excuses and the thrift store that sells forgotten birthdays, lies the dusty little boutique of tenuous links.

On its shelves can be found adverts featuring celebrities that don't have anything to do with the products they endorse. Sportsmen selling car insurance. Rock stars selling cans of dog food. And, right next to the store's bestseller – Paris Hilton's Diamond Quest, don't you know – is X-Men: Genetix.

Much like that offshoot of the Hilton franchise, X-Men: Genetix is a puzzle game, which, as you'll have guessed, has the cast of the much-loved X-Men comics and movies shoehorned into it.

The story is that following a hard night on the Guinness, Wolverine and friends make an ill-fated stop at Rotherham's most infamous curry house. There must have been something dodgy in the chutney though, because just a few hours later they are all bent double with terrible abdominal pains, fighting over the rights to the toilet. There are some things even mutant superpowers won't save you from...

Okay, this isn't the actual story. But it might as well be – and it would be a lot more entertaining than the plot here. The real deal is that the X-Men have been afflicted with a virus whilst out on one of their misadventures, and it's your job to save them from it, via the standard medical procedure known as The Puzzle Game.

In short, you match up three or more anti-viral cells next to the viral ones, thereby destroying them.

While the game assures us that these matching antics take place everywhere from the optic nerves to the carotid arteries of the X-Men, in reality all of the levels look, well, a bit colon-like. The various viral cells move along these stretches of gibblet and you have to get rid of a certain amount of them before they pass off the screen. You control a cursor that looks a bit like a magnifying glass and you whiz up and down the various bits of internal anatomy, swapping adjacent cells to line up ones of a similar colour.

Cheap jibes aside, X-Men: Genetix is a lot of fun. The control does get a bit fiddly on the more convoluted levels, since the default method requires you to move the cursor in respect to the twists and turns of the level. However if this gets too much, there's a simpler control method available whereby the '2' and '8' keys simply move you up and down the cell lines, although this doesn't feel quite as intuitive.

While there's not a huge amount of variation in the gameplay, there are a generous 30 levels, and they follow a decent difficulty curve. The visuals are nice, too, with high-resolution backgrounds that change every few levels.

As mentioned previously, the X-Men link is distinctly flimsy; before each level there's a nicely drawn picture of one of the crime-fighting crew, letting you know what superhero you're working on. But in truth this quality presentation is only good for Genetix, and it's matched by some suitably chirpy in-game sound effects.

With all this talk of purging cells and internal organs, you might think X-Men: Genetix is some sort of bizarre colonic irrigation simulator. In practice though it's a rock-solid and enjoyable puzzler. It's not the sort of game that you'll feel compelled to finish in one sitting, but with its quick fire levels perfect for short play sessions, you'll be re-visiting Genetix with the regularity of a victim of Delhi Belly.