For those who love short bursts of gameplay whilst waiting for a bus or queuing for your groceries, CandyCane have created Fuzzle - a puzzler that can be as fast, strategic or difficult as you'd like. The amount of option combinations seems limitless, and so you have plenty of opportunity to try out new game variations.

Fuzzle is a match5 game in which you must line up five coloured balls on the grid (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) to clear them. The twist is that every time you move a ball which doesn't make a group of five, three more balls are added to the board. In addition, to move a ball it must not be blocked in by any others - so part of the strategy is to keep the playing field as clear as possible, with groups spread around and not bunched up together. To mix things up a little more, there's two wildcard balls - the rainbow ball which matches anything, and the bomb ball which does the same as the rainbow ball but has the added effect of removing all the rest of that colour from the field. It appears more rarely as a result, to keep the game balanced.

Thanks to the in game settings screen, you can choose how you want to play Fuzzle - you get a range of five difficulty modes from kiddy to insane, you can choose to play with a timer (adds balls when the timer ends, even if you haven't moved yet), you can opt for showing the position of where the new balls are going to be placed and you can also scale the whole game down with the quick and small mode. You can also choose to apply a festive theme, perfect for Christmas. I liked to play without the timer and showing the placement of the balls - which adds a lot more strategy to the game, and feels less random. The other modes work very well as well though, so they're definitely worth a spin.

Cleverly, there's no colour blind mode - however, the seemingly random F letters are actually a good substitute, because they are always in the same orientation for each colour. This even extends to the Christmas mode, but instead of the letter F, each bauble colour has it's own unique pattern - it's very clever and shows that thought has gone into the design. The rest of the game is also solidly presented - sure, it's not as flashy and particle overloaded as some of the games that we've seen, but this actually works in Fuzzle's favour - to have clean, simple graphics and presentation that looks like it was designed for iPhone from the beginning. Music + sound effects also fits both themes very nicely.

In summary this is a very well executed puzzle game that has a wealth of modes, high scores (global and local) and solid production values. We wish that the scoring were a little more fair to risky strategies like waiting to make four matches in a row, for example. A combo system would have gone a long way, but it's absent here. Still though, Fuzzle will keep you playing for a good while and so we will recommend it to any puzzle fan looking for a challenge.

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