RooGooPublisher:SouthPeak Interactive
Platform:PC, Xbox 360
UK Price (as reviewed):£9.99 (inc. Delivery)
US Price (as reviewed):$19.99 (ex. Tax)

Games journalism is an strange old business, if I’m honest. Going into it there are things you think you are going to love and never get tired of – like actually being able to play games for a living.

At the same time though, there are things you accept and now that you have to do no matter how much you may dislike them – like being obligated to review games you wouldn’t otherwise let your most hated younger sibling be seen dead with just in case the crappiness turned out to be contagious.

Colleagues changing your forum avatar from your favourite comic book hero to an animated gif of you looking like a convulsing chimp strapped to an electric fence – that gets pretty old too.

Still, if I’ve learned one thing in life then it’s that things never turn out as you expect. That and making your own pastiche of famous Monty Python sketches never gets old – Two! The two things I’ve learned in life are…To hell with it, I’ll just get on with the review before the Spanish Inquisition turns up.

Tower of RooGooAs you’ve probably guessed from my introduction that touches on the issue of hype but is completely devoid of it, RooGoo is a game that finds itself firmly embedded in the latter of the aforementioned categories. It’s not something I’d usually play and it isn’t something I thought I’d enjoy. Still, in the name of Objectivism and Because Tim Told Me, I shoved these issues aside and started playing – and I wasn’t entirely disappointed either.

RooGoo is basically a fast-paced reflex puzzle game for PC and XBLA and if you’ve ever seen one of those kid games where you have to hammer the square blocks through the square holes then you’ll understand the basic gameplay mechanic.

In fact, as long as you haven’t had too much Fruit and Fibre recently and have thus avoided leaving your brain in the toilet bowl this week, then you’ll be able to understand the game. It isn’t exactly rocket science. The game basically involves rotating a series of circular platforms one at a time to allow various shapes to fall through the various holes.

Around this simple idea, the designers have wrapped a very loose, very pointless story that's so cutesy and pastel colours that it’ll make you want to rampage through Postal 2 immediately afterwards in order to balance out the overload of sweetness. In fact, the story is so laughably adorable and bowel-tremblingly sickening that we’ve just got to share it with you.

RooGoo is set on the planet Roo, which is a beautiful planet in a galaxy not too far away. The type of planet where the population has never even heard of Jar Jar Binks, lives in blissful ignorance of the Spanish Inquisition and is sustained by Meteors of Joy. All is not well though and soon the Meteors of Joy (sigh) are being eaten up by the king and the monarch is changing into an evil and greedy dictator. King Goo is becoming King Moo and his population of Roogoos are changing with him into a race of Meemoos.

Thankfully, the purest Roogoo of the land manages to escape and start saving the world by returning the meteors by funnelling them through floating sections of the earth? Yeah, this is where the narrative starts to get a bit fuzzy and where we start losing interest and start focusing on the gameplay instead.