Xango Tango

We're battle-scarred veterans of this thing called Life. There are many important lessons we've taken to heart. Stuff like 'never jump in a doorway' and 'don't whizz on the electric fence'.

Most important of all, however, is 'don't judge a book by its cover'. If that sounds like a clich� it's because it's a truth that's universally acknowledged. Jane Austen says so.

If ever there was an example of this, it'd be Xango Tango. Things looked very promising in the first five minutes, and we had cause to be optimistic. But from there things quickly went downhill and got a bit messy, kind of like a drunk in a shopping trolley.

The premise goes something like this: Xango is a robot who works in a toy factory, and one night he accidentally bundles his own spare parts with the latest shipment of toys. To recover these parts, Xango has to travel to toy shops all around the world and search for them.

So far, so good. The set-up is solid, and the characters are cute and colourful. It reminds us a bit of Bertha, a stop-motion animated kid's show we remember from a misspent youth in front of the gogglebox.

Once we started playing the game properly, however, we felt massively disappointed: it's only another bloody match-three game. What with all the cute window-dressing, the elaborate set-up, the jaunty theme tune, we were expecting something altogether different.

Instead, all Xango does is match three crates of the same colour to make them disappear. There's the obligatory clock to be racing against, plus the usual quota of power-ups to set off chain reactions and score multipliers. It's boring at worst, perfunctory at best.

The graphics are pretty, we could say that much. But they're not pretty in the way that counts. Whilst Xango and his movements are nicely animated, the field of play � the tanker containing the toy crates � is garishly cluttered.

Another issue is the difficulty level. If it's aimed at a younger demographic (as the graphics and general style seem to suggest), then why is it so bloody hard to play? After a couple of stages there's a sudden spike where the countdown timer becomes a ruthless steam-train that tramples all over any joy, fun or goodwill you might have felt.

In addition to the main Mission option, there are several other modes you can play through. There's a Puzzle variant and a 'Relax' mode, where you can bust crates without a timer. Again, these are standard features to be found in any match-three game, so nothing worth getting excited about.

We wish there was more to tell you, but that's the long and short of it. Of course, it's entirely possible for a match-three game to offer a new spin on the genre (the recent Chokeshin springs to mind), or perhaps even reinvent it entirely. But Xango Tango completely fails to do anything but be a generic example of its genre. The game isn't so much a tango as it is a conga; one long procession of silly movements that drifts aimlessly and has no discernible purpose.