Right now, unless you have a house in the middle of the Sahara Desert, we’re experiencing one of the coldest winter chills for 30 years, with snow and ice in your face more than a Z list celebrity on a popularity drive. What better way of beating away those blues and warming your cockles than with a puzzle game involving polar bears, ice and other wintry things. Yeah, I thought that as well.

Eiconic Games have given us a Bomberman style single screen affair, with our sharp clawed hero’s goal being the annihilation of enemies from each stage and reaching the exit before the timer runs out. It is a simple enough idea, and the prospect of toppling Mr Big and his really nasty oil company could well be the stuff of dreams if you want to combat climate change in a non-factual way.

Polar Panic does start off rather well and gives us a few options straight off the bat. As well as our 50 level story mode we also have another 50 devoted to a puzzle mode, which is a more cerebral workout in which you need to get to the exits in the fastest time and using the fewest moves possible. In addition to these two variants we have the Survivor Mode, which is kind of like Gears of War’s horde, but on a strict budget, but nevertheless, it give you and three others a chance to fend off increasing waves of enemy soldiers. Your standard leaderboards and online times are also included here.

The visuals on show are functional and do have a nice cartoon feel to them, but the problem is that there really isn’t a huge deal of variety to fully utilise any creativity that is seen in the first few stages. Short of a background change, everything else pretty much remains the same, which is a little disappointing, although for the puzzle section it isn’t quite as noticeable. I know this may sound a bit petty, but when you consider the task at hand, which is to get through 50 levels of this then you feel you need just a little more sustenance to get you there.

The music is just annoying. In the later stages it does get a little bit better, but by the time you reach those later tunes you won’t really be that bothered. This is due to a very irritating title track and some uninspiring game ditties from the outset. There’s nothing worse than your ears being filled with nonsense when you’re playing something (Call of Duty loudmouths also come under this category…and God knows we’ve all had them) and the first couple of attempts are such that if you can turn the music off, I’d advise you do so, chuck your iPod on and fill your lugs with some melodic bliss from that instead.

The saddest problem is that the gameplay suffers from the other parts being a bit sub-standard compared to the core part of Polar Panic. There is actually a pretty decent piece of software in there, but the other sections don’t reflect the same quality as this section. At it’s heart there is a retro arcade game, much like the Bomberman series, and you do get an overwhelming sense of nostalgia throwing blocks of ice around as if it was 1984 and you were slapping another 10p in to continue. The ability to play Survivor in a 4 player mode is also another very worthy addition and allows for the welcome comeback of mates round the telly playing the same thing simultaneously. All I will say in regards of a downside in this section is that it’s not playable with other people online, which is really the way games like this NEED to go now, as co-op gaming is becoming more and more of a big thing on the net, so there is a missed opportunity which a simple patch could change for the better.

Another thing I noticed as the hours went by was that I found myself doing something most irregular for someone like myself. Now, I never usually try and beat people’s scores on leaderboards, but I somehow felt captivated to get a really fast time on some of the puzzle stages (and just so you know, some of my times are in the top 10 in the world…so there). It really isn’t something that attracts me to a game for any length of time, but spending about half an hour trying to get one level done faster must mean something is keeping you hooked.

Taking everything into consideration you can’t help but come to the decision that Polar Panic is ok, but it never really gets out of the mire that is average. For every lovely pro that manages to stick its head up there’s always a con that manages to hide it before the prison lights can detect it. This could have been better and there is simply no way of hiding that. For 800 points you could buy the outrageously brilliant ‘Splosion Man or the equally addictive N+…..or Exit…..or Geometry Wars 2. What I’m trying to say is that for the same price there is just so much out there, and they are so perfectly balanced that you can’t really keep this game in the same league as them.

The other problem is that it’s another puzzle game in a very crowded area of Xbox LIVE. The sooner we find other things to add onto the marketplace, the better it will be for all of us. It is a solid title, but it’s just a little uninspiring and really doesn’t manage to grab you and make you happily play to the end of the story mode. I found myself just happy to make it to the end, which coincidentally will take you less than 2 hours, so don’t expect a lengthy gaming experience unless you HAVE to collect the family members and snowmen bonuses on every level. If you’re like me though, you’ll lose the urge after Chapter 3.

If there had been double the puzzle levels, an online Survivor Mode and even a Battle Mode introduced then I reckon this could have been a much different story. As it stands though, I’d have to recommend other games before this, but there are others that are far worse, I can assure you.

Average it is then…

VideogameUK verdict: 6/10