Puzzle Quest 2

This new item system - which includes the likes of armour and potions besides clubs and swords - makes your choices run a little deeper than musing over which class to pick, and also gives you a bigger range of offensive options in battles, creating a very light layering of tactics as you learn to approach different enemies differently. Money and experience, meanwhile, have been swept off the table entirely and saved, instead, for rewards at the end of a quest chain. Again, alongside snappier fights and the promise of loot, the end result is a less muddlesome experience.

Most importantly, however, someone's had a word with the game's enemies. Although the question of whether Puzzle Quest's AI ever actually cheated remains a topic of hot debate - certainly down at my local - it no longer feels like it does, which is the important thing.

Foes struggle to run together the ridiculous chains they used to be able to create (this was always particularly galling when most of the gems they fortuitously matched weren't yet on the visible play area) and, if you play on the easier settings, you won't hit the same kind of over-powered roadblocks that could crop up a little too regularly in the first instalment. It's still not the most characterful game of match-three knocking around - and, in terms of mechanics, Gyromancer's elegant strategy of pitting you against your own wasted moves rather than relying on actual enemy AI remains far smarter, fairer, and more satisfying - but the new sound effects and slight visual flourishes make the whole thing a little punchier than it used to be.

Multiplayer rounds things out, both in local and online flavours, including a brand-new tournament mode on Xbox Live which sees you choosing a load-out of four monsters to battle through rounds with.

The real focus of Puzzle Quest 2, however, remains the game's race-tuned mindlessness. With its streamlined missions and ever-prompting map, this is now dangerously, intoxicatingly close to being a game you can play on autopilot: lost in a zone where the battles become a dreamy colour-combining plod, and the quest itself is just a sticky layer of friction you button-bash your way through in between accepting XP, agreeing to move to the next area, and occasionally picking an attribute to improve. It's the gaming equivalent of a coma - albeit one in which you're regularly showered with imaginary trinkets.

It's probably no mean feat to make a game as emptily compulsive as this, and that might go some way to explaining why the likes of Gyromancer - which came, after all, with the backing of both Square Enix and PopCap - and Ubisoft's endlessly charming Clash of Heroes struggled to find the same kind of audience despite being superior games. They both made the crucial mistake, perhaps, of equating entertainment with some kind of thought, while Infinite Interactive is happy to argue that it's often largely a matter of muscle memory.