Don't be deceived by Roogoo Attack!'s adorable art style, as underneath the cutesy exterior is one of the harder puzzle games you'll ever play. It won't challenge your logic abilities like Professor Layton and the Curious Village, but instead push your pattern-recognition skills and reflexes to the limit in the same way a good game of Tetris might. And with over 100 levels present in the DS version, you can be damn sure that there will be more than enough challenge to last a good long while.

Before I get ahead of myself, allow me to explain what the hell Roogoo is really all about. There's a stupid storyline about some adorable creatures that need to collect shapes for power, but since it's utterly pointless that's all I'm going to say about it. The basis of Roogoo as a puzzler is guiding different shapes (stars, squares, triangles, circles and hearts) into various discs that have the corresponding holes on them (think the Fisher-Price toys toddlers play with and you're on the right track). Players rotate these discs, guiding one or more type of block at a time in an effort to make enough of them pass through the bottom-most disc. Screw up too many shape matches, though, and it's game over. It sounds really simple -- and mechanically, it is -- but it gets absurdly hard towards the end, even on the normal difficulty, and will provide a satisfyingly difficult challenge to players of any skill level.


The levels are challenging, but what's most important to making Roogoo enjoyable is that they manage to vary them enough that it never gets too repetitive. The main levels feature the same basic premise, but the little challenges they include -- such as levels where the blocks randomly change color, or perhaps fall especially fast or move backwards -- adds a lot of variety and a sense of spontaneity that's important in making a puzzle game interesting beyond the first few minutes.

Further keeping the game from feeling repetitive are "skydiving" levels, where players rotate an on-screen character who is falling from the sky in an effort to gather shapes. These optional levels, as well as the various challenges thrown in throughout the game's progression, make the single-player stay fresh, and give you that just-one-more-level sort of feeling when you complete a stage.

Like its XBLA predecessor, Roogoo Attack! is a great little puzzle game. It has a stupid story, but with a ton of levels -- several more which can be unlocked by linking the DS version with the Wii version once -- and some great single-cart multiplayer play, it's a fantastic choice for any DS owner who's up for one heckuva challenge.