Genuinely new ideas can be tough to come by. With so many developers constantly sticking their hand in the puzzle game pot, it's no wonder there are so many re-skinned clones out there. Roogoo may not be a totally innovative take on the classic falling-block puzzler, but it turns it on its head enough so that the gameplay feels fresh and fairly exciting for what it is. Packing 45 levels and offline split-screen multiplayer, it may not as wow powerleveling fully-featured as its Xbox Live doppelganger, but it's still worth a look for fans of the genre.

While the folks at Spidermonk (the developers) do attempt a story, it really doesn't have much an impact on the action -- or your enjoyment level. You play as a Roogoo. One of the few remaining kind-hearted blokes in the alien race, in fact. It seems that King Goo, ruler of Planet Roo started stealing "joyful meteors" in order to fuel construction efforts to build new, bigger cities. After consuming meteors for some time, King Goo and his followers changed from cute little Roogoo into mean, nasty Meemoo. Now you have to stop the wow powerleveling Meemoo and Prince Moo in their efforts to attain the rest of the falling meteors all for themselves.

Now cue up the gameplay.

See, these falling meteors are actually the blocks that you'll need to guide into place throughout the 45 stages. There are six different worlds that you'll progress through and while the gameplay of stacking blocks and maneuvering them through the various platforms that the game presents begins easily enough, the difficulty quickly escalates.

When you first see it, you'd think any kindergartener could play Roogoo. Heck, you might be right, at least for the first couple of stages. After all, all you're doing is lining up a square block with a square hole, a triangle block with a triangle hole, etc... wow gold But then it gets faster, obstacles start getting in your way, two more blocks are thrown into the mix making things even more hectic, and all the while you're worried about collecting enough of those little suckers to make it to the bottom of the level.

As you might expect, Roogoo isn't exactly a visual stunner. It has a cutesy art style and the story sequences done with cartoony stills feature adorable little creatures; even the bad guys. There are some very slight framerate issues, but only at the end of stages when the score swoops across the screen. It never really lessens the experience. Everything else moves fluidly.

There are differences between this and the Xbox Live version, and they unfortunately work against PC users. For this one, there's no online support of any wow gold kind. That means no leaderboards, no online multiplayer, or anything like that. With such a large potential for smack talking, as we've seen from the Xbox 360 version, it's a shame that the developers didn't take the time to port over the net code with Roogoo PC. Luckily, the core gameplay translates fine, despite being relegated to a keyboard's arrow keys for most of the actions.