KooZac

If you enjoy the challenge that Tetris provides and also love Sudoku puzzles then you will probably be very interested in KooZac.

Rather than depending on rotating the shapes to fit into the right place, you must get your head round some basic maths. In this game you have a block with a number on fall from the top of the screen to the bottom. What you must try and do is match up the numbers in vertical columns to equal the number that’s shown in the right hand side of the screen. You score more highly for the more blocks you use to add up to the total, however you also run the risk of ending your game early as you’re limited to only having 25 blocks on the screen at any one time – should you go over that, it’s game over!

Don’t worry if maths isn’t your strong point, as I mentioned earlier but will try to highlight, this is very basic maths. The funny thing about this game is although I’m not quite Archimedes when it comes to numeracy, but it’s well within in my capabilities – mainly because the maximum figure you need to add up to is 9! The only real challenge comes from how quickly you can add up.

There are three types of challenges to get stuck into; relax, classic and expert. In relax mode it’s a marathon setting with no tasks and no speed. Classic gives you a task list (which you must complete to go to the next level), drop bonus and 12 levels of difficulty (with the falling speed increasing every level up). In expert mode, there’s speed changes, bombs and many more things to keep you frantically bashing your keypad. Overall, these three levels are much the same apart from the little challenges and the speed increase.

Controls are simple and effective, the block falls from a random position at the top of the screen. You then use your left, right and down button to position the block into the right column. Fortunately to make it a little easier to gauge the positioning of the blocks you have a grid outlined in the playing screen – which I found very helpful (and wished that Tetris would adopt this to help get the positioning right when at speed).

I found myself able to do quite well at the slower speeds but started to really struggle once it got into the next few stages. This for me came from the constantly changing number that I’m trying to total up to. No sooner did I get the numbers tally up I then would realise that was for the previous turn and before too long I was looking at the ‘Game Over’ screen. To be fair though, this all added to the games challenge and addictive qualities and certainly as I got better with my calculations, I got better scores as a result! I think Carol Vorderman’s job is never going to be challenged by myself but perhaps I’ll be seeing you one day winning on Countdown all thanks to this little game?!

Rating 84%

Positives

Ingenious take on the drop-down block and eliminate genre

Very challenging and entertaining

Once you’ve got this game under your skin you’ll be up all night playing it

Improves your maths skills under pressure

Negatives

A little repetitive

If maths is not your strongest subject then you may want to steer clear

Not masses of difference between the three types of game