A handful of you may remember this one if you have ever owned a Nokia phone. Formerly known as City Bloxx, Tower Bloxx Deluxe builds on a small series of surprisingly addictive games.

I mean honestly - how much can you really expect from a game that you used to play to kill time at work or school on your mobile? Not nearly as much as Tower Bloxx Deluxe offers, that’s for sure.

The aim of the game is quite simple; build the tallest tower out of piles and piles of building blocks as the tower sways back and forth. With such an easy-to-grasp concept, Tower Bloxx quickly becomes very, very addictive. You are rewarded and punished for your successes and failures during each individual build, giving the game a little bit of meaning other than mindless bricklaying. Positive boosts to your score (besides earning points for the height and population of your tower) are obtained for perfect block placement after dropping one from your swaying crane onto the also swaying tower below, with certain pieces boosting the population. You get score multiplier bonuses for doing so.

 

However on the contrary, if you drop a block which happens to miss the tower and tumble thousands of feet to the ground you lose a ‘retry’ - and be careful, as you obviously only have a limited amount of these.

Basically your main goal is to have the highest tower you possibly can. There’s a relative amount of competition for this too, as Xbox Live includes online leader boards as well as markers for your friends highest towers. It also lets you know how many blocks you have to build before you beat their score as well as your previous best.

A few different game modes are present, although you generally find yourself only playing one of them - Quick Game, which lets you get straight into the action for a quick fix. The others include a Time Attack mode and an extremely slow and boring story mode called ‘Build City’, that seems to be filled with more cheap cut scenes than actual game play.

Multiplayer is also in the mix, however there is a lack of online support for this section, as you may only play either against or cooperatively with your mates in split-screen. This is a little disappointing, but forgiveable because the rest of the game is just so much fun. Unfortunately however, playing Tower Bloxx far too much tends to get unbelievably repetitive, as you would expect from such a basic game. But it really is a game with reasonable entertainment value and a slightly different concept than usual.

 

The novelty of Xbox Live avatar inclusion is quite neat too. Often you will catch a glimpse of your character manning the crane that places each block, and during the build there are a number of little cut scenes for you to view, changing the higher you get. These range from watching civilians walk the streets below to right up in space where satellites and space shuttles float around your tower. It’s all a little childish but a bit of extra detail nonetheless.

There really aren't many cons to Tower Bloxx Deluxe. Sure the lack of online multiplayer support and tedious campaign are a slight disappointment, but for the most part the addictive entertainment in which it offers is fantastic.

Admittedly Tower Bloxx is not a game for everyone, however if you play it sparingly you will find it’s a game that you will return to for quite some time.