So. Hot on the heels of my previous ShellBlast review comes this humble opinion of its new, Xbox-based cousin: ShellBlast HD. Vertigo Games was kind enough to supply me with a review copy for this sprightly bugger, so of course I latched onto it .

And hey, guess what? It's just as good as the original.

A quick note before we begin

The above single-sentence summary of ShellBlast HD can be taken in two ways. On the one hand, it's delightful to see something like this being made available for the Xbox community. It's just the sort of title that works really well for the Indie Games platform and the execution of its PC predecessor has already set a standard for tension and quick-thinking that I have a personal borderline-fetish-thing for. In a nutshell: really cool.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how established fans of ShellBlast are going to respond to this. The game is pretty much a clone of the PC version with a little bit of extra spit and polish thrown in. That's not necessarily bad: it's just that a few extra achievements, some renovated graphics and one or two features here and there don't really justify the purchase of this as a whole new product — unless, of course, you're a diehard who absolutely has to have this on your console, in which case the decision is a no-brainer.

So, yeah. People who have played ShellBlast before: you know what to expect. It's a flashier and slightly more enhanced version of what you already love — download the trial version if you want and see what I mean.

The rest of you, come this way.

What is ShellBlast HD?

ShellBlast HD is a bomb defusal game which has you, lo and behold, defusing bombs. In this hot-wired world of counter-terrorism and quick thinking, Sudoku has a baby with Minesweeper and spawns complete madness.

It's lovely.

The game progresses through a series of levels which represent the various bombs you have to disarm: each bomb consists of a few pistons hidden within a blank canvas of grid blocks, and it's your job to hunt down and mark these pistons before the bomb timer hits zero. At your disposal are two "SDUs" which you can use to scan a given cross-section of the grid. These find out how many pistons are detected from your current position, and the player's challenge is to use the information provided from various locations to work out where the buggers are hiding.

It's difficult to describe (the tutorial is, by necessity, quite extensive), but once you understand the core concept, it's very comparable to those good old logic challenges that you'll find in puzzle books. Throw in the ever-present threat of a nuclear explosion, and you have a winner on your hands.