Meteos is a puzzle game, and like many puzzle games it is all about pushing little coloured blocks around. It looks familiar, even if you've never seen it before. Its tone, however, is new and bombastic. This is a puzzle game about the end of the world.

For the moment, let us leave aside the question of how a puzzle game can be about the end of the world. This one is, and it is so with outrageous confidence. "Why," it demands, "shouldn't a puzzle game be about the end of the world? Why not? You going to answer, or do I need to blow up your house to get you to take me seriously?"

It is sometime in the future. Humanity has colonized dozens of planets. Unfortunately, humanity has not done much work on planetary defence technology, and nearly all its holdings across the galaxy are in grave danger. The source of that danger, as you may have guessed, is little coloured blocks that fall from the sky. We are on Tetris world, basically, except that we don't merely lose a turn when the blocks pile too high; instead, our homes and families and, indeed, our entire existences are burned into hot space dust.

If you have enough trauma in your day job that you find this line of thought unappealing, you can relax and forget about it. Aside from a few lines of text and a portentous musical flourish, the end of the world, as rendered here, is very much like losing a turn. Historical note: Many years ago there was an arcade hit called Arkanoid, which was basically a sleek remake of Breakout pretending to be an adventure game about spaceships. Maybe the people who came up with that one were sipping the same cocktails as the Meteos team.

But on to the coloured blocks. They are all squares. They fall from the top of the screen and settle in neat columns at the bottom. Whenever three or more of the same colour form a horizontal or vertical line, that group launches into the sky like a rocket, complete with jets of flame at the bottom. Any blocks that happen to be above the flames also get pushed skyward, and as they hit the top of the lower screen, they are destroyed.

The more blocks going up, the slower the liftoff, so if you launch a big stack, many of the bricks will fall back down after the initial burn fizzles out. The key is to make more groups of coloured blocks on stacks that are already airborne. This ignites secondary ignition, see, and is sublimely useful for clearing out space on the screen.

You play by moving individual blocks up and down vertically. Using the on the DS touch screen, you put the nib down on the block you want to move, then you drag it up or down to the place you want it, and then you lift your pen. If doing so creates a 3+ group of the same colour, the rocketry begins.

The action is slow in the early going, so much that the designers have thoughtfully provided a "speed up" button off to the side. But as more and more bricks fall, and you begin to get a few stacks into the air, you learn to be grateful for breather moments. The moment a stack goes up, you scan it up and down, hunting for that rogue brick you can drag into a group. As you do that, you fail to notice that a column over on the other side is nearing the top, and that the world is therefore about to end. You do some quick shuffling and defer Armageddon, but by this point you have two new stacks growing dangerously tall.

When the game is in all its glory it is just like juggling. You throw block after block after block into the air, and you try furiously to keep them all there. You always fail in the end, of ocurse, but the attempt is the sweetest kind of desperation.