Lemmings

Tailored for the mobile format, this retro conversion of Lemmings makes cuts and tweaks in all the right places to ensure that old school fans and Lemmings virgins will be similarly delighted.

For the latter, if they even exist, a quick recap: you are a godlike figure who must empower your followers with specific skills in order to help them negotiate a series of increasingly deadly environments. The upside is that there's quite a diversity of skills on offer, varying from the mundane digging, climbing and building bridges to the more exotic floating, smashing and erm... exploding. The downside is that you only have a limited number of each of the skills to endow, and your eponymous disciples are lolloping rodents who joyfully trail after one another regardless of the spinning blades, toxic pools and sheer cliff-faces in their path.

So ensues a rich mix of initial strategic planning (put a blocker here, build a bridge there) followed by a rather more frantic execution in which you put your stratagems into action and, more often than not, witness the one small but fatal flaw in your plan lead to another mass suicide.

The difficulty level is well-balanced with early essentially tuition levels giving way to ever more challenging obstacles and corresponding reduced time limits and skills. The control system has been equally well implemented with a handy lock button enabling you to select a lemming and track him in advance of allocating a skill. Naturally, even the most sensitive of phone joysticks is no match for a mouse, but if anything this adds to the frantic nature of the challenge rather than detracting from the game.

However unarguably, the real genius of the game is to be found in both the open-ended design allowing you to experiment in your approach to most levels and the characterisation of the lemmings themselves. Graphically it's virtually identical to it's forbear, cramming more character into a couple of pixels for it's hapless heroes than many home console titles can manage with a full textured 3D model. Even the most saintly among us must admit to taking a guilty pleasure from triggering the Armageddon option when a level has either been fluffed (or achieved) with lemmings to spare, starting a countdown from 5 after which the rodents literally pop their clogs.

Disappointingly, the immortal cries of the lemmings ('let's go!' when the level opens and 'oh no!' when facing imminent death) are absent although the familiar jaunty music tracks remain. The only other real criticism to offer is, as with the original, there are only 30 levels to play through and no new ones.