To say that I’ve become cynical and devoid of all hope at the ripe old age of twenty-five is something of an understatement. Great games are rarer to come by these days. I’m not talking about good games; there are plenty of those. I’m talking about those emotion-invoking ones that take you back to being a child, and remind you just how much fun you can have with a video game. Trine 2 is one of those games.

Trine 2 allows the player to reprise the multiple personalities of Amadeus, Pontius and Zoya as they move from left to right, fighting monsters and solving puzzles. For people slow on the uptake, the ‘left to right’ comment indicates that this is a side-scroller and should feel immediately familiar to anyone who played the prequel Trine. I personally didn’t, but knew enough about it to recognise it instantly.

One of the most important parts of this game is its characters. The three heroes of this particular piece are back, living their separate lives prior to The Trine (a mystical artefact) showing up and whisking them away.  For newcomers to the series, you’re given a brief time to handle each character individually before their destinies are intertwined into one changeable being.

First you have Amadeus, the wizard; he is something of a coward but speaks more common sense than the other two and can regularly be heard moaning about having to go on the adventure in the first place, apparently being more concerned about what his wife’s going to do to him when he gets back. Priorities and all that, I suppose.

Generally I found him to be the weakest of the characters, although this does obviously depend on your point of view. From a puzzle-solving perspective he’s invaluable. By using the mouse you can draw a box and alas one will appear. To begin with, that is quite literally all he can do. This means that, in a combat situation, he’s about as useful as a chocolate shield in a volcanic storm as he has no tactical choice but to run away. Although his conjured boxes appear to be made out of metal clockwork parts, they’ve got less structural integrity than a house of cards and most enemies just smash straight through them. Not great for combat, but will solve the majority of your puzzle-related roadblocks.

Next you have Pontius, the knight. He fits the usual bill of being a gallant hero of the kingdom, although he looks like he’s seen a few too many celebratory feasts and not enough dragon slaying, but who am I to judge? He’s the one with the big fucking sword. Yes, Pontius is goblin-smashing, spider-crushing, general-level-wrecking man of action. He comes equipped with the aforementioned sword and a shield to boot. The shield will protect him from the majority of the game’s hazards, (it’s acid proof according to our hero, and he’s not lying) and it makes for a handy swimming aid (you’ve really got to see it to believe it). While Pontius is more than ready to get his hands dirty when it comes to a fight, he’s not got many uses puzzle-wise, although he can smash a few obstacles if need be but even if he does, you’ll probably need one of the other people to make use out of whatever it reveals.

Finally you have Zoya, the thief. She’s a very pleasant blend of both combat and puzzle-solving, with an eye for treasure, but also has a certain amount of intrigue about her. She doesn’t shy away from danger, but is also focussed in looking out for herself. I’ve found myself using her more often than the other characters and, being a thief, she’s all about stealth and deception. I’m not into any of that bollocks though, so while I’m pulling the strings, she’s flying all over the place using her grappling hook and firing arrows at anyone that Pontius hasn’t already gutted.

The story itself is fairly forgettable, which is a shame given the colourful and interesting characters you’re given to work with. Thankfully, however, it does pick up somewhat in latter parts of the game. While I continued playing regardless, other players who look for a story to motivate them, to propel the game forwards, may be disappointed. Suffice it to say, there is a strange kingdom, some giant talking plants and a princess. There is also an air of mystery to the story but that only gets revealed, as I said, much later on. I do, however, think that it could have been incorporated sooner to help with pacing.

Narrated in a fairy tale style, the story is told by a male with a nonchalant manner. He certainly doesn’t sound bad but equally doesn’t sound all that interested, although he does try. I just can’t escape the feeling that he’s not invested in the story, and his voice very quickly becomes nothing more than a drone. It probably wouldn’t have been a problem a decade ago, but I’ve been spoiled by the likes of Patrick Stewart and Logan Cunningham and it’s for that reason that I really didn’t enjoy the narration in Trine 2, and wanted to skip through it at every opportunity.

Nevertheless, I’m not here to have some man tell me a story. I’m here to get knee-deep in some puzzles and bad guy guts. Thankfully, where the story is lacking, Trine 2 makes up for it with its gameplay and I’m told that it’s similar to the first, so if you enjoyed that and wanted more, you’ve come to the right place. The puzzles themselves start off insultingly easy, and I scoffed as Amadeus magicked up a box to jump between ledges or Zoya swung across pits. What stops you rushing through these early stages is the orbs. In every part of every level, there are tons of these blue orbs. Some are floating, quite innocently, in mid-air while others are trapped behind barricades, ready to tumble out and some are left totally out of view. You collect these orbs as you progress, and for every fifty points you can level up one of your heroes’ abilities.

It’s an excellent way of keeping things fresh in the opening stages. You could quite easily rush straight through, or opt to try and hunt down everyone of these buggers. I’m not an achievement whore, nor do I care about collectables and yet, for some reason, I wanted all of those orbs. They do come in handy, because some of the abilities you can unlock are actually pretty enjoyable. Amadeus really just becomes more of a puzzle cracker, introducing abilities to create more boxes and a ‘plank’. Zoya picks up various flavours of arrows and a stealth move, while Pontius gets to deal more damage and a very important hammer that you can… throw at things. Very cool. Some of the later unlockables require you to save up the skill points, so it does become a question of what to invest in and when, adding some depth to the game, but also causing problems.

For example, if I were to ignore Zoya and Pontius and just plug all the skill points in to Amadeus, I’d be creating four boxes and planks fairly early on. This would make some of the mid-level puzzles incredibly easy. I obviously can’t confirm my next statement, but I’m pretty certain that I managed to cheat at some puzzles by jumping from a ledge to a plank and a box that I managed to conjure in mid-air. No idea if that’s right or not, but surely that can’t be the solution. If you hadn’t taken the skill points down that path you wouldn’t know to do it. It’s a bizarre moment when you do encounter this and you wonder if you’ve trumped the game by accident.

Not all puzzles can be broken (if at all) this way and the ones that don’t are very well created. The Portal series is easily one of the cornerstones of physics-based puzzle games and while the Trine series may not be as well-considered, they certainly can tease a braincell or two. Many of the puzzles revolve around water or air currents, and they’ve even thrown in a cheeky portal or two to boot. None of these should have you stumped for days, ripping your hair out and beating the screen to death with the keyboard, but they will make you stop to take a look at the situation and wonder what needs to be done. No puzzle takes longer than perhaps ten minutes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing and is actually quite refreshing. Frozenbyte should certainly be commended for making the puzzles challenging, yet not frustrating.

If puzzles aren’t your thing, then your probably more of a combat person. Orcs, spiders and vicious plants are among some of the creatures that will try to stop your progress in Trine 2. Combat is generously sprinkled between various puzzles and if your fighting against the Orcs, you’ll find a mix of offensive and defensive enemies – smaller guys with knives, bigger guys with clubs, and archers all vie to exterminate the player. Surviving these encounters usually requires a blend of both Pontius and Zoya, and I was pleased to discover that it’s not all just down to Pontius to fight the opposition, as it’d feel generic and arbitrary. “Here’s the big guy, he’s for fighting!” Instead, Zoya assists with ranged opposition thanks to her bow. Amadeus, on the other hand, is only good for slipping over in Orc guts and cracking his skull on one of his magically-created boxes.

While the combat is fun, it does get a little stale towards the end. Sheer numbers make way for challenge and it’s a case of being overwhelmed rather than your own lack of skill. Pontius can only point his shield in one direction, and the other two can’t block attacks at all. There isn’t much variety in opposition either, although this is a very small bone of contention; you’re out to fight the Goblin King after all, so having some robots and the Russian Spetsnaz show up to add something different would be a little out of place. Magical powers and Russian Spetsnaz? Now that’s a game I’d like to see.  Some of the better character-killers are the ones you can’t actually kill. These take the form of man-eating plants and giant spiders. There’s no killing those bastards, and it’s an excellent blend of puzzling and scare tactics that force you to circumvent rather than fight your way past the opposition.

When I first saw Trine 2, what drew me to it, having very little knowledge of the series, were the graphics. The still images you see are gorgeous and portray a vibrant, colourful world; it looks to be full of life, imagination, and magic. It screams creativity. In motion, it does all of that but with the awesome cranked all the way up to maximum. In short, this is quite possibly the most gorgeous looking game I’ve ever seen. Your Battlefields and Calls Of Duty may be able to mimic realism until the in-game models leap out of the screen, slap them in the face and say “STOP CASHING IN ON THE SAME SHIT EVERY FUCKING YEAR” but what they don’t have is a world dripping with substance, style and, most importantly, belief. It’s a strange thing to say; that a world modelled on our own seems like more of a game than the lush environments I’ve been bounding around in Trine 2.

I’m no graphical genius; I can’t tell you about pixels, sprites or any of that jargon. I’ve got no idea what makes Trine 2 look so gorgeous and, from a consumer point of view, I don’t need to. The game looks awesome but, at the same time, it’s so much more than that. Trine 2 is teeming with life. It oozes and drips from every pore of the game. The landscapes you move through react to your every touch. Leaves flap in the wind, boxes bounce their way down bottomless canyons and our heroes slip and slide through a world that even they seem amazed by. It only adds another layer of immersion that the people you’re guiding through this world don’t just treat it as yet another location that they’ve probably all seen before. They appear to be as genuinely amazed as I was. I don’t usually point out specific things from a game that I loved in a review, but the level that seemed based around a witches lair or witches den was simply incredible. Everything that was going on in the foreground, the background, above me, below me… all merged into this one believable world that totally engrossed me. Graphics is easily Trine 2′s trump card over a good majority of the games currently on the market and if what your eyes see is the trump card, then what your ears hear is the ace up the sleeve. Trine’s whimsical score will have you tapping and bobbing your head along as you play; some can get a little repetitive but, for the most part, they are excellent and change by level, doing a stellar job of further expressing the world around you. Each character speaks at various points in each level, and it is fun to hear them squabble amongst themselves or voice an opinion. Genius.

Having played through Trine 2, I didn’t explore the co-op side of things. I am reliably informed that it is a giggle though. You can essentially spawn multiple types of each character which problem makes the game a little easier but ultimately more fun. It will certainly take some of the pressure off the later puzzles which had no problem in being a real tough nut to crack.

For those of you who’ve never seen a gaming-capable phone or any kind of website, Bejeweled is the bazillion-selling match-three puzzler from PopCap, the guys who brought you the maddeningly addictive Peggle and the brilliantly charming Plants Vs. Zombies. The original game saw you swapping over pairs of jewels in order to make a line of three, at which point they disappear and more drop in from above in the tradition of Columns or, to a degree, Tetris.  The last game in the series, Bejeweled Blitz, was a lightening fast effort that saw you playing one minute matches of either the Classic mode or Twist (a mode where you rotate groups of jewels rather than swapping pairs) but control issues, combined with a huge luck requirement, made it a little disappointing and the one minute time limit meant you could never really settle into a groove with it.

Thankfully, any concerns I had with that game (or any other in the series) have been dealt with. Firstly, there are a choice of eight modes (some of which you have to unlock, but there’s not too much difficulty involved in doing that) that all give distinct flavours of the Bejeweled formula. These mostly do away with the one minute time limit, thankfully, and have their own set of in-game badges that are awarded for various feats. The great thing about the badges and associated achievements are that their targets are focused on skill rather than chore or luck – definitely a first for the series.  It’s worth mentioning the various modes, as the game borrows from plenty of other games while always keeping true to the series’ roots.

Classic

The basic flavour of Bejeweled that sees you swapping pairs of jewels until there are no more moves left. A simple match three puzzler.

Zen

An endless version of the above but with a bizarre ‘biofeedback’ system that is supposed to chill you out by playing certain frequencies at you and moderating your breathing. The jury is out on if it works but if you want a quick chill out and have played a little too much Chime, this will suffice.

Lightning

This is a one-minute mode, similar to Blitz but with the chance of earning additional time from making special gems. That ability makes this mode far more enjoyable than Blitz and is perfect for a quick bash.

Butterflies

One of the best modes in the game, this plays like Classic Mode but with ‘butterflies’ – special pieces that can be manipulated and destroyed like regular jewels – that climb up the board from the bottom with each move. If they get to the top, it’s game over. A good degree of strategy is required if you want to get the big scores on this one.

Poker

Another excellent mode, that gives you a jewel for each move you make. Clear a set of red jewels and you’ll get a red one in your hand. The idea is to make a ‘hand’ of five jewels. The harder the hand, the more you’ll score. So three reds and two yellows (a full house) scores higher than a pair, for example. It’s a little bit like the XBLA title Poker Smash, but not horribly hateful.

Diamond Mine

Taking its cues from the dreadful Mr. Driller, this mode has you destroying the ground beneath you by making matches next to any soil pieces. Destroy a whole horizontal row of soil and you’ll drop down to the next depth. Tactical thinking is key here and the time limit keeps things suitably frantic as you look to get the next row clear, which will give you a thirty second time bonus.

Ice Storm

Possibly the most frantic mode of all, Ice Storm seems your game board filling with water as you play. Once the water reaches the top, it starts to freeze. If a column freezes, it’s game over. Making horizontal matches will stem the tide a little but you really need to make vertical matches as this will clear entire columns of ice.

Quest

A set of tailored levels that use the other modes in the game (and a few extra ones) but have specific challenges associated. These range from easy to maddeningly tough but this is a very enjoyable mode with plenty of variation.

Although I have favourites, none of the modes disappoint and the twin-stick controls (something that Blitz really needed) make playing any of them almost as effortless as the formats the game was really intended for. With the incentive of getting all the badges, there’s plenty of reason to keep coming back before you even start thinking about the online leaderboards, although those are likely to hot up in a few months time when this game inevitably becomes an Xbox ‘deal of the week’ title. However, despite the cost, knowing what I know now, I’d buy this. It’s a great game, perfectly polished (with the clean, bright look you associate with all PopCap titles) and is ideal for quick plays. Even if those quick plays are likely to stretch out for hours.

Among the very first games I ever played was DMA Design’s Lemmings. It’s a far cry from what the studio is now most famous for, but it’s still a name you can fondly bounce off another gamer, eliciting high pitched cries of “OH NO!” followed by a chuckle and proclamations of how awesome it was. I remember it, you remember it and Tomkorp Computer Solutions remembers it, resurrecting the puzzling strategy for a modern day hurrah in the form of Clones for the PC.

It’s an odd phenomenon of games gone by that no matter how much we may love them, they rarely survive the tests of time. Playing Pac-Man, for example, is nowhere near as cool or fun as it was back then, but with a little tinkering, you get the joys of Pac-Man CE: DX, updating everything you loved about the game and making it work for our modern day demands. Clones is to Lemmings what Pac-Man CE: DX is to Pac-Man. Taking the stage under a different name with blobs of googly eyed goo in place of the green haired, blue dress wearing, supposedly suicidal Lemmings, just how does the formula of herding minions from ‘A’ to ‘Exit’ hold up, and have Tomkorp provided enough distinction to warrant you parting with your cash?

To alleviate any immediate concerns, Clones is not at all setting out its stall to be something new, different or unique by ignoring the heritage it now shares. With Clones, Tomkorp are paying an excellent homage to DMA’s major break into the industry, never shying away from the subject or attempting to gloss it over with some crazy marketing guff. Clones is simply the natural evolution of the Lemmings genre, bringing a vast array of meticulously designed levels, a detailed level design tool and online community features which happily rival Media Molecule’s Little Big Planet. Consider that the team behind this have also invested a great amount of creativity in the construction of entirely new game modes that you never thought could work in a game cut from the Lemmings cloth, and you’d be wise not to underestimate it.

For anyone that spent 1991 pretending to be all sad about the world and stuff, smelling like teen spirit, Lemmings saw you instruct a crowd of bipedal Lemmings over, under and through a two dimensional plane of terrain to a magical exit, possibly containing cake. The creatures were mostly autonomous, constantly walking until an obstacle forced them to turn around or until the laws of gravity were asked to give a demonstration of their most basic principles, further supporting the urban myth of what it is Lemmings like to do near cliffs. The player’s role in all of this was to assign a temporary skill set to an individual Lemming, instructing them to dig, build bridges, climb, deploy umbrellas to ensure a safe landing or, occasionally, to reveal themselves as the founding members of Al Qaeda. Making the best use of these numerically restricted tools resulted in the safe guidance of the Lemmings to the Promised Land and Clones begins in much the same way.

In fact, the very first level you’ll play is ‘Just Drill it!’, a tongue in cheek reference to the very first level in Lemmings, ‘Just Dig!’. But here’s where I’m going to stop talking about Lemmings as this is where the two shake hands, wish each other well and go their separate ways, promising to write at Christmas and to send each other pictures of funny animals wearing hats that they find on their travels. You see, there’s not quite as much challenge in simply guiding the bipedal blobs from their creation to the exit point that can hope to engage the modern gamer; there needs to be something more.

Love them or hate them, collectibles are one of the first introduced, additional challenges to the formula, asking the player to carefully consider how best to proceed in the level that will allow them to gain the ten-twenty or so Qdots, scattered throughout the terrain. Collection is not essential nor is it encouraged, with progression in Clones tied purely to puzzle completion, and collection of the Qdots tied to the unlocking of extra materials for use in the level editor, Stamps for decorating the level with as you play and Decorations to dress up the Clones.

Upon completion of your very first puzzle, you’ll discover the extra layers of challenge that Tomkorp have engineered into the genre. Having installed the game and launched it for the first time, Clones will ask you to register your CD key to an account created on the game’s website. This one time only requirement then grants players still connected to the internet synchronous access to the global scoreboards, ending each level by comparing your efforts with that of the thousands of other players around the world and assigning your scores to a position on the leaderboards. Players are judged on the number of Qdots collected, the number of Clones who survived compared to the number lost, the amount of morphs used to solve the puzzle and the total time required to incur victory. As it stands, I’m the eighth greatest Clones player on the stage ‘A Bit of Mold’ and I’d thank you if you could avoid besting that.

It’s again, not a required element of the gameplay that you’re going to have to sink some time into in order to progress. Having presumably taken some inspiration from Nadeo’s brilliant and mind-bendingly fun TrackMania series, these scores are ultimately arbitrary and only for those who have that screw loose in the back of their head which forces them to do better until they accept that 8^th is as good as it gets and who take to politely threatening other people on the internet to leave their high scores alone. Stats are tracked in-game and on the community website, though sadly it’s not a perfect union.  Clones is only able to track personal statistics in-game is unable to present the world rankings from inside that environment, instead automatically alt-tabbing you to an internet browser, which at least tabs back without any hiccups when you’re done plotting someone’s demise.

Unlike TrackMania, replays of those better than you are unavailable, meaning that if you want to know how to beat them, you’d have to resort to the hiring of an iPrivate Eye to e-stalk the culprit who will ultimately (and hopefully) beat the solution out of them (watch your back ‘SnakesEleven’). For anyone completely befuddled by a stage and simply in need of a more general solution to any of the puzzles, each level is pre-loaded with a Replay Guide, accessible at no penalty to the player, save for the moral quandary of knowing that you weren’t able to figure it out yourself. It’s definitely a handy addition to the game, meaning that fifteen minute sessions on a 120 second puzzle are at least salvageable for your sanity at a moment’s left-click. That said, just because you’ve seen the puzzle completed, paused it, re-wound it and watched it at half speed doesn’t mean you’ll have an equal amount of luck in completing it. Skill is certainly as big a requirement as logic and patience are with this one.

Each puzzle is a unique challenge, sometimes affording you a gracious amount of ‘Morphs’ (the tools available to you ) and often limiting you to only a select few morph abilities. As you would expect, each particular morph is introduced to you, demonstrated, trialled and then tested. The first level provides you only with the ability to dig vertically down, transforming the lower section of a blob into a mining drill and stopping once it has either cleared the obstacle or hit the indestructible material, Clonium. In the event you end up trapping a poor Clone, while his brethren march on to the end of the level, you can of course detonate any remaining Clones in a shower of particles that makes you feel both bad and oh so good at the same time. As you advance, the remaining eleven abilities are granted to you, with each given a stage or two to ease you into its function and practicality before throwing you into the deep end and shouting at you to stop drowning. Rarely does the game grant you full access to all eleven abilities simultaneously and whenever it does, they’re often limited in number, requiring you to think carefully before deployment. For the most part though, the number of morphs available is often more than adequate and it’s only in the later levels that this generosity is taken from you, asking only the most dedicated of whoreboard chasers to think twice about how many they need to use to end the level.

Borrowing a little from Popcap’s Peggle, the Clones Single Player ‘Pilgrimage’ requires you to learn from the ten Elder CloneMasters, each operating from their own region of the Clones Planet. Each CloneMaster has a particular leaning towards one skill or element of level design which sees you submit yourself to 14-19 stages of topographic puzzles. Your first stop is the Caves with the CloneMaster DrillDude, followed by RoboBrain in the industrial Cloneoppolis, all the way to a final showdown with the ultimate Elder, Wattson R. Ice on the Astral Planes. There’s no plot to glean and little interaction with anything other than the blobs, although each region is prefaced and concluded with a short and charming clip of the CloneMaster, designed to ease you in and reward you for your efforts. The characters never talk, save for a short briefing for each level in which they’ll taunt you in text to goad you into seeing the next one through. When you find yourself on a good solving streak, it’s too easy to ignore these and almost criminal to do so, given that the taunts are often funny and help to distract you from the frustration of failure.

After meeting incremental targets, more CloneMasters are made available to you and you’re mostly allowed to switch freely between the regions, although should you attempt to leap from region to region without seeing one through to the final confrontation, you’ll find progression restricted beyond where the developers have designed for you to have been sufficiently educated. With over 150 levels to challenge the player, Clones can’t simply rely on hoping that they’ll enjoy the standard game mode of ‘Corral the Clone’ and, in order to keep you interested, they’ve invested a creative amount of time in refreshing the experience for those easily bored and have come up with some brilliant twists in the process.

Never believing that any other type of gameplay could work for the genre, Clones boasts an extra five game modes, each with a unique take on the formula. Procure the Particle is an obvious variant of Capture the Flag, only (of course) it’s not quite that simple. In this mode, it doesn’t matter how many Clones you get to the end of the stage, just that you navigate your way to the location of the particle, allow one of your Clones to carry it, and then guide this now non-controllable Clone to the Particle Switch to trigger a victory. It sounds simple, but given that you have to prevent this Clone from suffering any environmental mishaps, it’s actually a very deep challenge to undertake.

Capture the Clone operates on a similar principle, asking you to guide an, again, non-controllable Clone to the stage exit.  I discovered one of my favourite examples of this in Roast Ed’s region, where the Clone was ten times the size of my Clones and all of my tunnels and dig holes had to be big enough to accommodate its vast size, somehow resulting in me becoming very attached to the giant, lumbering oaf. Quantum Quarrel pits you against other teams of Clones in a battle royale where the last remaining group is declared the winner. Each Clone is given a health bar and morphs adopt a more violent function, allowing the horizontal Clobbing morph to pummel any opposing Clones, and the detonate function to serve as the great Jihad.

Most prominently, the main alternate to Corral the Clone are Multiverse Matches, pitting you against a second team of Clones on a symmetrical, simultaneous half of the map whereby the winner is whoever manages to score highest. These often crop up in the form of Boss Battles, pitting you against the CloneMasters who encourage you to watch how they work. By far my most favourite of all the game modes, however, are the Quantum Loop stages: a puzzle-fuge of past, present and future, in which you to take control of three separate Clone groups in three separate attempts, ultimately requiring you to lay the groundwork for the final grouping that must reach the level’s end. I cannot begin to tell you just how mind bending these puzzles are, asking you to make your first move and then to avoid interfering with it on the next play, ultimately working towards victory. If Portal 3 wants to take a leaf out of this book, I think I might sit it out for fear of my brain melting and seeping out of my ears. Great fun; damned hard.

Of course, all of these stages are in preparation for something a little bigger. While nobody could turn their noses up at 150 plus stages of increasing difficulty, the game lives on in the Clones Community who have been beavering away with the Level Editor since Clones’ digital release last year, and it now offers hundreds of levels on the official website, crafted from the same tools the developers used to create the Pilgrimage.  The inbuilt Level Editor is a robust tool, accessible enough for those with no background in level design but perhaps challenging enough to put off people like me who love the idea, but are both too lazy to really sit down with it, and who are happy enough to be the player rather than the creator. The editor features tutorials to show off the basics and the advanced elements of design, with additional .pdf resources available direct from the website. Installing custom content is as easy as downloading the ‘package’ and using the in-game installer to locate the file and automatically work it into the game.

I spent hours toying around with the community’s creations, amazed by the ingenuity of some, entertained by the intelligence of others and grateful to the one guy who has dedicated his time to recreating levels from that game I said I’d stop mentioning. It really is up there with LittleBigPlanet in terms of ingenuity, with one map I encountered being an oddly placed but awe-inspiring replica of Tetris.  I know that, given the inclination to invest the effort, I could happily knock together something satisfying, but given the breadth and talent already on offer, I was more than satisfied in my role as Player.

Graphically, Clones is not a demanding game. I ran it on my preferred setting of 1920×1080 without hiccup, happily alt-tabbing to the community leaderboards and occasionally hitting the ‘\’ key to quickly and painlessly switch to Windowed Mode. There’s little in the way of impressive tech at work here, save for the bouncing physics behind the particles of exploded, smushed or splatted Clones which fire off bits in a satisfactory way. The entire art style is lovely with each of the six environments being rich in colour and a joy to watch; animated backgrounds and added details, such as a shark with a spring loaded nose, kept me more than entertained. The home screen for the Pilgrimage is a well rendered 3D world that lets you spin it around for your own amusement, zooming in closer to display the CloneMaster’s regions on level select. The whole game ran smooth with no technical or graphical glitches to mention and my only quibble being that when Clones are increased or decreased in size, the textures never up/down res accordingly, as such, the Big Clones aren’t always easy on the eyes because of this.

Musically, Clones is rather tedious, limited to only a handful of tracks that you honestly will get sick of. There’s no Scotland the Brave, Galop from Orpheus in the Underworld or Ronda alla Turca, just some synthesised music that you’ll have no desire to listen to on your thirtieth attempt of any given stage. The rest of the audio is pleasing enough, never going any further than the game requires, knowing the for the most part, your attention is fixed on dealing with the problem at hand.

To control however, the game is a joy. Tomkorp have clearly invested a lot of time in deciding how best to give you the most control, especially for the guaranteed moments of panic when the game really does become hectic. Each morph ability is easily activated by its own keyboard shortcut, through a click-wheel system dubbed ‘The Belt’, or for those with fancy-pants screens, you can make full use of the game’s inbuilt touch-screen functionality. If you’re happy to kick it old school, you can of course rely on the much simpler method of left clicking on the Clone and then left clicking once more on the generously sized panels to initiate a morph. I never really once felt let down by the controls, only by myself at not being quick enough to respond to them and was always grateful when an in-level tool-tip would remind me of functions available at my fingertips.

There are other technical features I would hope the game would make use of, however. Playing on both my high end PC and dying-a-death laptop, I felt it was a shame that Clones wasn’t taking advantage of any internal cloud services, with only the Steam version able to provide that. Seeing as Clones required a registration, login and sync with the game’s internal server, would it really have been too much extra work to track player progress externally, or perhaps I’m now just being far too picky and critical over what is otherwise, a resounding success for puzzle games everywhere.

A bizarre platforming title, featuring a slab of meat.  Or rather, a boy without skin whose girlfriend, Bandage Girl (stay with us) gets kidnapped.  Who didn’t see that one coming?  Anyway, the cad of a fetus in a top hat who was responsible ensures that our unlikely hero has to traverse over 300 levels of saws, fire, and other traps to rescue her.  Given that the US have a sexy edition which includes a 40 page behind the scenes sketchbook/comic, pull out mini poster, and soundtrack, we’re very much looking forward to seeing just what this set will deliver.  The games should see a Q3 release.

So, if you fancy stepping into the shoes of a trapped archaeologist, striving to find a way out of some ancient Mexican ruins with the help of the mysterious ‘Ball’ artifact, put your listening ears on…

Thanks to Iceberg Interactive, we’ve got two fantastic prize bundles to give away.  Each bundle includes the full, original uncut retail version of the game (which also comes with bonus material including an autographed developer postcard and a soundtrack CD), along with a quirky mousepad.

How to Enter

Since you’ll need your wits about you to tackle this puzzle action title, we’ve made it as painless as possible to take part.  No questions or CVs needed, just make sure that you FOLLOW US at http://twitter.com/gaminglives and paste the following phrase (including the link) in to your Twitter feed:

I want to win The Ball Bundle @GamingLives because that’s how we roll in the shire at http://bit.ly/GLBall

And Then?

The competition will be drawn on Friday 19th November at 6 pm and the lucky winner will be announced on this page and on Twitter and Facebook.  If you’re the lucky winner of The Ball bundle, then we’ll send you a DM on Twitter and ask for your address to get your goodies sorted. No annoying questions to answer, no fingerprinting, retina scans, or questions about your favourite colour… just follow us and pass it on. Simple. If we see that you’ve not followed us, or you’ve not tweeted the phrase, you won’t be eligible… sorry!  Good luck.

And the winners are…
Congratulations to our two winners PiMD and FullCircle_360! Thanks to everyone else who entered!

And I’m glad that the game made its way back onto my radar. The concept is a fascinating one, on closer inspection. You play as an archaeologist who had been working halfway up a dormant volcano in the jungles of Mexico, complete with Indiana Jones style hat, when they fall down a shaft and become trapped in a cavern underground, with even less resources than those available to a Chilean miner. Searching for a way to escape, you shortly come across an ancient artefact that looks a bit like a pneumatic hammer with a skull on the back of it, which manipulates a massive metallic ball. Using the ball to further advance into the volcano, it becomes clear that you’ve stumbled over a find of great significance to the origins of human civilisation, but one which will happily kill you to keep its secrets.

In terms of actual gameplay, The Ball is deceptively simple at first look. You see the world from a first person shooter perspective, and control the game using either the traditional keyboard and mouse combination or a compatible control pad in much the same manner as any FPS title.  Instead of interchangeable firearms however, you carry the device that controls the ball; it looks like a Mayan built prototype of Unreal Tournament’s impact hammer, with the left mouse button firing the hammer mechanism whilst the right attracts the ball to you.

The hammer has no offensive potential by itself whatsoever, bizarrely not even making as much as a sound upon impact with anything other than the ball, which it repels with considerable force. Your HUD consists of an indication of how much health remains to you before you succumb to your injuries, as well as telling you how far you are from the ball at any given moment.

Primarily, The Ball is a puzzle game. Using the control device you fire the ball into switches that you cannot otherwise reach, as well as using it to demolish obstacles and as a movable platform that you can stand on to access areas that are otherwise just beyond your reach. You can also attach the ball to certain large objects and structures with ropes, before walking away from it using the attraction ability of the control device to effortlessly move things far beyond the limits of human strength. Other useful party pieces the ball can do include covering it with flammable oil, rolling it up to explosive objects to create an oil trail, and then rolling it into a naked flame to ignite the entire affair and set off a detonation, as well as being able to hide behind it and roll it along in front of you as a shield against arrow traps built into the walls.

Successful completion of almost every puzzle requires clever manipulation of the ball, with puzzles becoming increasingly more fiendish as the game progresses. There is an option to bring up constant hints during each one by pressing a keyboard button, but even so not every puzzle late in the game is, by any means, a simple matter to figure out. This provides considerable intellectual challenge during an initial playthrough, and also helps with replay value in the form of subsequent speed runs, with many puzzles requiring you to follow a specific sequence of actions to activate.

Total reliance on the ball also applies to the game’s combat. There are a variety of enemy monsters in the game, ranging from fast moving hordes of man-sized humanoid mummies, through crocodilian looking brutes, to bosses that include a zombie gorilla beast behemoth that makes King Kong look like a bubbly and attractive lingerie model in comparison. Your only means of defence against these antagonists is the ball. This doesn’t always work too well with the basic enemies that are scattered throughout the game from the second of the five areas inside the volcano and onwards.

It is extremely satisfying to splatter mummified hordes, and the game makes good use of gore effects, but getting the ball to hit them in the first place so that you can crush them can be awkward and laborious, especially as even the most basic opponents are smart enough to dodge out of the ball’s path, on top of being remarkably fast and inflicting a large amount of hurt on the player when they get within mauling and biting distance. Boss battles are much more fun and not as randomly frustrating, taking the form of a more dangerous and time-restricted puzzle where you have to use the ball to interact with the level environment to take down the largest foes who cannot simply be mown down with the ball in the same way. At times, this brings to mind quite strongly the boss battles from the Legend of Zelda franchise since, in spite of the aesthetic and perspective differences, ingenuity and clever use of the level itself are critical to success, rather than simply trying to brute force your way past these engagements.

Speaking of aesthetics, The Ball is frankly one of the best looking indie games I’ve ever seen. Employing Epic’s Unreal Development Kit to great effect, in unison with highly detailed textures, lighting and some great design work, this game is stunning to behold running at full clip, with very little framerate drop or tearing, and impressively still very attractive even at its lowest settings and resolutions. Every monster and item and object in the game looks like it belongs there, with the sole possible exception of the ball control device (it is just a re-skinned impact hammer, I’m sorry).  The exotic Mayan setting provides quite a lot of eye candy that hasn’t been tasted often in other games, and offers an intensely atmospheric and, at times, oppressive ancient underground world to explore. Level and puzzle designs are fantastically well thought out, with a slightly retro feel, as though inspired in part from some of the great id Software and Epic developed FPS games of the past, with elements of classic Quake and Unreal Tournament sneaking into the layout of the game world and environments. The tendency of the Unreal Engine to “texture pop”, with high-res textures loading several seconds after levels start, is still occasionally visible, but much less of an issue in The Ball than in other games running on the engine, at least on my current hardware setup.

The in-game physics don’t quite live up to the graphics. It’s possible to fall from a large height without being damaged, and the ball always rolls in a straight vector away from you until it encounters an obstacle… despite the design of the ball clearly not being perfectly spherical, with flat edges and protrusions that should affect the manner in which it rolls across its surface. The ball can also hurtle into the player with more than enough impact force to flatten you into a thin paste and yet somehow causes no damage whatsoever, which impacts on the realistic look and feel somewhat. However, these are minor details that don’t really detract from enjoyment of the game unless you are particularly pedantic beyond the initial realisation of them.

The audio work within the game works well, with some competent voice acting and sound effects. The stand out in this aspect of the game is the music, which adds considerably to the atmosphere, and helps to immerse players into the world The Ball is portraying.

The UnderGarden hits XBLA and PC on 10th November 2010, so if a touch of serenity floats your boat, chuck out that old tape of Whale music and prepare to get your gaming gear around this surreal looking puzzler.

Mrs Peacock may have been a man, but Miss Scarlet certainly isn't, as Mr "Reverend" Green will attest!

Being a long-time PC gamer, I’ve played my share of PC games in the past, and then some.  By far the biggest collection of PC games I own are “point and clicks”, which to the uninitiated involve walking around, picking stuff up, solving puzzles, MacGyvering stuff together, and chatting people up (Well, interrogating them really).  So I’m here to share my love of this overlooked little genre.

“The Secret Of Monkey Island” was my first, followed by “Simon the Sorcerer”, but the one that really cemented my enduring love of this particular game type was “Cluedo Fatal Illusion”.  The graphics were state-of-the-art at the time (1999 – god I was 17!) and I’d never experienced anything like it before; not just the graphics but the immersive first person perspective that made you feel like you were really there.  The whole murder mystery, whodunnit thing had me head-over heels.  I’ve always been a sucker for the old ‘group of people stranded in a mansion and being picked off one by one’ scenario, so this was gaming heaven for me. (Sexy Miss Scarlett being a bonus!)

Something wooden... something devoid of life... night vision camera... all that's missing is dodgy mascara and a gobby northern lass!

Fast-forward to today and you’ve got outstanding titles like “The Lost Crown” and “Return To Mysterious Island” among many others ranging from the easy “Nancy Drew” series to the near ‘impossible to do without a walkthrough’ ones like the “Myst” games.

So, first person or third? Personally I don’t really have a preference. For me things like the story and gameplay take precedence over whether it’s first or third person, so this doesn’t factor into whether I buy a game or not.  It’s nice to be immersed in the game first person style, interacting with characters, feeling the atmosphere, and having the shit scared out of you on occasion.  However, it’s also nice to see just whose life you are meddling with and get a little more attached to them and the story, not to mention sending them places and getting them to do things that you would avoid in real life, because you watch movies and you know the ‘rules’. But hey, it’s not you right?

Then there’s the inventory. Aaaaaah, the inventory. If it’s not nailed down then it’s destined for your Tardis-like pockets.  Anything from bread to ladders, it’s coming with you whether it belongs to someone else or not.  I get a weird sense of satisfaction every time I pick up a new item, thinking “Yeah, inventory!” Or muttering under my breath “InvenToryyyyyyyy.”, with a smug little smile on my face. And it feels even better when you finally figure out where to use that bloody rubber chicken or knock together a battery out of some coins, cloth, bamboo, and a lemon (Seriously). Still, you can’t help but feel a bit sorry for your character hauling around a sack of cement or walking around with a giant banana picker stuffed down their trousers, I mean, that’s gotta chafe, right?  But like it or not, they’ll do as they’re damn well told, because you WILL need that chocolate fountain at some point, implausible as it might seem.

Before Harry there was Simon... and he didn't need two "hangers on" and an owl to make things happen! Just a mouse.

I do have a few gripes with these games though, one being that they are just not long enough (with the possible exception of “The Lost Crown”). Another is when a game won’t allow you to add stuff to your inventory until you’ve seen where you can use it. (Yes “Rhiannon” I’m talking about you.) I mean how annoying is it to pick up something like a torch that you just KNOW you will need, but not be able to take it with you until you’ve clicked on the dark stairs? Answer: VERY! Having to traipse around every bloody area in the game trying to find that poxy oak branch you saw earlier but don’t remember where, can be extremely frustrating! As to graphics, some of them are quite dark, which makes for a great atmosphere, but when it’s SO dark you can’t even find the bloody door handle, it kinda irritates!

Despite their various flaws, some anti-climactic endings, and a format that some might call repetitive, you can’t help but keep going back. Adventure, horror, mystery, puzzles, and murder, this genre has it all. And you’ll see it all too: ghosts, vampires, druids, pirates, books that transport you to another world, machines from the future that consume people, giant moving stones that turn you into a pile of ash, and monkeys called Jep.  Oh, and normal people too. Wonderful escapism that will consume hours of your day and night, but in a good way.

So say goodbye to sleep and hello to the multitude of lives out there just waiting for you to take over and see through to their end again and again. And so, “point ‘n’ clicks”, in the bellowing voice of Whitney Houston: “I will always love youuuuuuuuuuuuu!”