Mouse Puzzle is a fun puzzle game, but it's shorter and less varied than typical games in the genre. Although there is a whole range of difficulty, and some of the later levels are quite challenging, the gameplay remains the same throughout all of the levels. There isn't enough content or variety in this game to make it worthwhile.
If you've played a game like Sokoban or Chip's Challenge, then the gameplay in Mouse Puzzle will be familiar to you. Each of the game's 50 levels consists of a single screen, viewed from the top down. You navigate a mouse square-by-square and in four directions, from one end of the screen to a piece of cheese that is placed somewhere else on the level. In your path are barriers and traps that you must either use or navigate around. The walls cannot be moved or altered in any way, but you will find rocks scattered all over the board. The main function of the rocks is to fill up pits littered about the level that the mouse can't otherwise get around. Once the pit is filled, the mouse can move over it or push rocks over it freely. The challenge of the game is to plan moves in advance, since once you commit to moving rocks, any wrong step usually requires starting the level over again from scratch. There's no punishment for retrying the levels ad infinitum, however.
The most amusing element is the time attack mode, which consists of the same puzzles from the regular mode, except that you're required to see how many you can complete in a five-minute period. Since the puzzles tend to repeat, you can catch a lucky break and play a string of maps that you remember, enabling you to breeze through quickly. On the other hand, you might get stuck on one level for the five-minute duration. This mode is fun for a short time, but it doesn't really bring the game enough much-needed variety. The presentation is solid on the LG MM-535. The small graphics of the mouse and cheese are tinted blue in the regular mode and turn to a sepia hue in time attack. The sound effects neither help the game much nor hinder it, but they merely indicate that you've pushed a rock into a pit or that you've fallen into it yourself.
Mouse Puzzle is good in certain respects, but it's less fulfilling than many other games like it, and it could have benefited from both a few different tweaks to the gameplay as well as a few more levels. Puzzle fans would be better served with a game like Slyder or Chip's Challenge.
