Roogoo

Trying To Jam the plastic triangle into a circular hole is a challenge that many of us had to overcome as children, in the merciless battlegrounds of pre-school. For the characters in the world of Roogoo it's a matter of life and genocide, as the geometrically shaped meteors threatening their world can only be stopped by catching them in a set of spinning discs. The bright colours, nonsense plot and simple controls mean that it doesn't take someone with a PhD in fun to work out that Roogoo is meant for the casual market. This is one of those games with a very simple task that doesn't change significantly, but just gets harder until you're finished.

Roogoo takes the simple concept of matching shapes to holes and adds the potential to get it horribly wrong. The idea is to guide the different shapes that trickle down the screen into matching holes by rotating the discs, thus creating stacks of identical shapes that disappear once they reach the final disc. While this might sound like the most brain-sappingly tedious task, each level does more than change the background. To make things a bit more interesting there's a cock-up gauge that puts a limit on your mistakes and ninjas who shred your shapes into the confetti of failure.

Slowly introduced obstacles such as shutters, speed boosts and flipping platforms keep the challenge fairly constant, but frustration sets in when flying creatures pick up your neatly arranged stacks and lift them back up the chute, drawing the process out unnecessarily. That said the game's difficulty curve rises gently, until the last few levels when it suddenly shoots up at a right angle.

Roogoo is the very definition of a casual game. While it does nothing spectacular, it has enough pretty colours and plain, shallow addictiveness to hold your attention for the two or three hours the game lasts. There's no real replay value beyond chasing a needlessly perfect score, so any extended life has to be drawn from the disappointing offline split-screen multiplayer. If you're interested in colourful, casual games and have huge bundles of tenners burning holes in your mattress, then it might be worth peeling one off to buy this game. Before putting the rest of your cash into an environment more sensible and Peggle-shaped.