In a nutshell:

Brick-bashing fun, given a graphical makeover but little more in this N-Gage remake.

What’s it good for?

Twiddling your thumbs with guaranteed addictive gameplay, even if there’s little special about its N-Gage treatment.

Judgement time…

Block Breaker Deluxe is an N-Gage remake of a Java-based Gameloft title that’s been kicking around for years. That’s not to say the game is dull, or even showing its age. It’s still one of the best crafted and most addictive brick-battering games around, and looks great in its latest incarnation.

Nokia’s new games platform makes the title run faster than ever, and while the graphics are largely unchanged, they’ve been switched to landscape mode, making them seem larger and more legible.

Still, little else is new. Sure, N-Gage offers multi-player options, but the real block breaking fun is to be had in single player mode, especially given the title’s story-driven level structure, which challenges you to beat certain scores in order to progress through a league.

As you’d expect, all the usual bells and whistles are in place. From power-ups that drop from the crumbling bricks left in your wake, to challenges for extra points along the way. There are even ‘boss levels’ with time limits, or ever-increasing numbers of bricks to smash before you can progress.

But ultimately, there’s little to make us recommend the N-Gage version of Block Breaker Deluxe over the standard Java fare. In fact, when the Java version is available for £3, compared to N-Gage’s £6 offering, we’d recommend the opposite.