Download Games Roundup

Piczle Lines

• iPhone / free (extra level packs available for purchase)

Admittedly, Piczle Lines just looks like some brain-optional logic puzzle game where you pair up numbers on a grid until a picture forms out of the chaos. But look how lonely they are. They're certainly not going to track down their ideal partner by themselves. You're welling up just thinking about it, admit it.

Maybe it is brain-optional. Or maybe I just really like tidying things up for reasons too dark to unpick. Whatever it is, Piczle Lines is the game I had to positively force myself to stop playing this week.

Score Studios knows exactly how to reel players in. It all starts off with a premise so simple a baboon could figure it out, but there you are, hours later, still doodling wiggly lines in an endless expression of numerical reunification.

Presented with an empty grid full of numbers, you have to gradually fill in the entire grid line by line by connecting a path between two numbers of the same colour. To start with, you'll doodle in the low numbers, like 2, 3 and 4, because they're almost impossible to screw up. The larger the number, the harder it is to determine the correct path, and the more genuine logic needs to be applied.

With three packs of 20 puzzles given away for free, you might imagine Score has missed a trick for such an obsessively addictive game. But once Piczle Lines has its hooks in, you may as well surrender. Along with recent obsession Numba, this is pure puzzle perfection.

9/10

Aquattack

• PSN Minis (PSP & PS3) / £3.49

Scientific studies have objectively, verifiably demonstrated that even live Outdoor Bowls commentary is marginally more interesting than talking about match-three videogames, so hang in there.

Mere Mortals' admirable Minis effort involves saving hapless fishies before the beastly fishermen haul in their nets. As with seemingly most things in life, ensuring their route to safety involves lining up three colours of a kind and cackling inappropriately as tasty points come pouring down an imaginary pipe.

Armed with the ability to move each row left and right, and each column up and down, you're constantly shuffling the board around, eyeing the next opportunity to free these tasty morsels from certain doom.

In the quick-fire Arcade mode, the goal is to simply rescue as many as you can for as long as possible before the counter expires. Create a line of three, four or five and you're awarded with a few more precious seconds. Faff around, though, and it'll be Game Over in a couple of minutes.

But where Aquattack (Aquat Tack? A Quattack? Aqu Attack?) really comes alive is in the monumentally compulsive Challenge mode. Comprised of 50 short, sharp tasks, this mode gives you a target (make two lines of five), and a time limit (30 seconds) and thrusts you into a series of panic-stricken situations that often require lightning insight and forethought to pull off.

What starts off as a fairly humdrum spin on match-three soon reveals itself to be a devious little time thief. Do not be deceived. Show it the error of its ways.

8/10