In a nutshell:

It’s the old-school munitions disposal puzzler, with one or two new features included.

What’s it good for?

Getting rid of landmines on the way to work - and if you’re us, getting blown up many, many times in the process.

Judgement time...

Anyone who’s ever owned a Windows-based computer should be familiar with Minesweeper: it’s the deceptively simple puzzle game which tasks you with clearing a grid of deadly explosives - or rather avoiding them and marking their locations with a flag.

How do you work out where they are? Well, you’ll have to risk being blown up by “sweeping” a grid square: if it’s mine-free you’ll be told how many mines are in the adjacent squares, but not their precise locations - you’ll have to use similarly numbered nearby squares to work that out for yourself. We’ve made it sound way more complex than it actually is - basically anyone with a basic grasp of puzzles should have no trouble picking it up.

Indeed, the real problem might be putting it down. Minesweeper is a devilishly addictive game once you get into it - but is this version really much of a step-up from the old Windows edition?

In an attempt to spice things up a bit the makers have jacked the graphical polish up several notches. While the eye candy isn’t heaped on in N-Gage amounts, the top-down view has been replaced by an isometric layout with cityscape backgrounds and crisply animated characters - so when you do step on a mine, your little sweeper is blown up and left blackened and smoking in true cartoon style. There are sound effects too, of course, but probably the biggest departure is the addition of a shop in the career mode, which allows you to splash your earning on items to help in your explosive-defusing quest.

These items aid you by revealing mines, or giving you an extra life if you fall foul of one, but in a way they take a lot of the fun out of the game, so purist puzzlers would do well to avoid using them. The only other addition is a pretty pointless multiplayer mode, which has you taking turns in a race to uncover the most mines.

Despite the new features being little more than window dressing, Minesweeper’s crack-like basic gameplay will have you pulling out your Nok for “just one more go” - and for that reason, it gets a big thumbs-up from us.