Lumines Supernova Review

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And yet the presumed show-stopper, the LittleBigPlanet skin, turns out to be a surprisingly restrained affair: a muted row of Sackboys and a few familiar papercraft sound effects which make it quite hard to recognise for the first few seconds. It's fine, but it feels like a missed opportunity, given the tantalising prospect of Media Molecule's tweedy take on yesteryear colliding with Q Entertainment's slick sense of tomorrow.

Despite this slight disappointment, the best of Supernova's new efforts leave you unsure whether you want to eat them, wear them, or hang them on the wall. All have benefited from the increased download size available on PSN, which means there's no need for the perceived short-cuts of Lumines Live, with its nasty textures and faint air of cheapness.

Local multiplayer replaces the online option of the XBLA version, which seems hard to explain unless it's going to be sold separately - in which case it's simply hard to justify. Meanwhile, alongside the standard Puzzle, Mission, Time Attack, and Skin Edit modes, there are two entirely new confections. The first is Dig Down, which tasks you with clearing a path through twenty levels of half-filled play areas. It's a pleasant enough way to spend an hour, but one you're unlikely to come back to that often after you've completed it. The tantalising Mr Driller concept never quite creates the time-beating replayathon it promises due to the seemingly random tile deposits at the start, which turn some attempts into pushovers, while others are bloody-nosed grinding sessions.

Hopefully, LittleBigPlanet will be the first, rather than only, game to get the Lumines treatment.

The second and more intriguing addition is Sequencer, a tool which allows you to create your own soundtracks and then play a few rounds set against them. Sequencer is a bit of an oddity: with audio files to choose from on one tab and a musical timeline to stick them onto on another, it's cumbersome to get to grips with, and yet remains fairly limited at the same time. Despite a wide range of drum beats, bass lines, and various jangly effects to choose from, you're reorganising music rather than truly creating it. And no matter how much work you put in one end, Robert Miles tends to pour ceaselessly out of the other.

Although the new toys fail to entirely justify themselves - and if you can forgive the absence of online options, and look past what many perceive as the heresy of playing the game on anything other than a handheld - Lumines Supernova is probably the fullest incarnation of the game yet available. The franchise is clearly being milked, but when the milk in question is dazzling and neon and shot through with sequins and pear drops, it's hard to get too annoyed about it. That's probably because there's something about the best puzzle games - and Lumines is confidently among the best - that renders them timeless, their abstract nature eluding vogues, cultural bias, and the endless arms race of Moore's law.

Despite the endless variety, that distinct Lumines look remains weirdly consistent.