I have something of a confession to make. Soul Bubbles and Viva Pinata aside, I haven't been excited by a DS game since... New Super Mario Bros.? Well, if not, then quite a long time, anyway. The innovative little handheld's sheen has taken a battering by the constant drip of shoddy ports, samey puzzle games and tiresome shovelware, so forgive a little scepticism when a review copy of EXIT DS arrives through my door. The fact that it's both a port and a puzzle game should have caused an audible sigh, but it hasn't, because EXIT was a rather brilliant (if repetitive) puzzle game when it emerged on PSP and then again on Xbox Live Arcade - and it remains so on the DS.

For those unfamiliar, EXIT is a puzzle game, despite the back of the box making it look like an old school platformer. You control Mr Esc, a coffee-addicted escape artist who revels in the challenge of helping innocents escape unscathed from burning buildings, frozen buildings and town centres filled with Christmas shoppers (probably). Each 2D map has a number of survivors in it and you must use the environment to do everything in a logical order to ensure that you can get each one out. Put a foot wrong and you'll be reaching for the restart button - an action that's necessary with alarming regularity.

The game becomes really interesting when you realise that the different people you need to save have different skill sets and limitations. Dogs can jump long distances and crawl into small spaces but can't climb walls or use a pickaxe (score one for realism!). Adults aren't quite as agile as Mr Esc but they can help him push heavier objects, while some morbidly obese characters lack mobility but for some reason have the strength of the Incredible Hulk. Using these ingredients and the tools you pick up along the way, EXIT is less a platform game and more an exercise in logically performing actions in the correct order needed to complete the puzzle. This was clouded by the PSP version, which tried to be a jack-of-all-trades by combining pinpoint jumping (which would often end in a shower of expletives) with the concept of cause and effect. With the stylus, surely the game makes the death-defying jump across handheld platforms with ease?

The difference that the switch to stylus play brings is a subtle one, because it feels less like you become Mr Esc and more like you're simply managing him. This is good in theory, because it makes frustrating jump misses a thing of the past - well, after you get past the initial learning curve and ten-level tutorial, at least. Fortunately, a little persistence pays off and as soon as you realise exactly where you need to touch to get Mr Esc to climb a ledge, for example, you can actually start navigating the maps with very little difficulty and begin to blame your brains rather than the programmers for your repeated failures. It does make the speed runs slightly redundant though, because there's now a flat rate for when Mr Esc runs and jumps and speed is less down to manual dexterity and purely at the feet of his internal algorithms.

This is an improvement on one level but it does take some getting used to - and even when you're used to it, you can be justly angry when the game doesn't do what you wanted it to due to the inexactness of the touch screen input. Given that some of the later levels can be ten minutes long and that having to restart often is a problem at the best of times, it's just a kick in the teeth to be thrown back to the beginning through no fault of your own. The original had its problems as well, with NPCs having to be guided up staircases like unruly children, but now the same problem is extended to Mr Esc himself. It's not all bad though - the areas where you previously needed to use the PSP's analogue nub to move a pointer are just plain better on the DS and if you persevere it does become quite intuitive. It's just a pity that it's not more clear-cut, because many people will be put off after their experiences with the incredibly long tutorial. You can also go back to the 'classic' controls (their name, not mine - I'd call them 'basic', 'traditional' or 'frustrating in a wholly different way'), but they're hidden away in the options screen where many won't see them and most people would be forgiven for not realising how effective they can be.

With over 100 puzzles that can take as long as ten minutes to complete, even when you know what you're doing, the package is excellent value for money but still falls a little short of its 360 and PSP cousins, simply because the puzzles on the cartridge is all you'll ever get. Both the other versions allow you to download new puzzles, but the DS' only online functionality is barely worth configuring your Wi-Fi to experience; you can upload your level times to a server and see how you compete worldwide. That's it. To me, that's the gaming equivalent of a DVD listing 'scene selection' amongst its special features; it's hugely disappointing and certainly not putting the blue Wi-Fi circle of loveliness on the box. Still, the large number of puzzles makes it lengthier than many other DS games of late, so it shouldn't be a deal breaker.

Like many puzzle games, EXIT is fiendishly long and addictive, but what separates it from the majority of the genre is its looks. The game is a beautifully stylised title with hand drawn silhouettes wandering around angular, cartoony backdrops. It's lost a little of its graphical fidelity from the 360 and PSP version but given the relative power of the machines, this is no real surprise. The biggest drop is the amount of surroundings that you can see on the DS' tiny screens, but this is made up for by the familiar use of the top screen as a map display. This is a godsend and actually means that you're more in tune with your surroundings than in either of the other versions.

The sound doesn't hold up anything like as well unfortunately - but this will be of no surprise to anyone who played the previous iterations. The music is forgettable but the worst offenders are the voice samples that continually repeat the same bits of corny dialogue: "Is anybody there?", "Help me!" and others. If anything, this is slightly less prevalent than in previous versions, though whether this is due to gamer feedback or the limited aural qualities of the DS I am unable to say.

EXIT DS is a flawed classic in the puzzle game genre but there's definitely enough here to be worth checking out if you haven't played any of the other versions in the three years since the game's original release, you don't mind hair-tearing frustration, and you have the patience to get to grips with a control scheme that should be far more intuitive than it is. If you tick all these boxes and love puzzle games (one more for good measure) then you and the two other people not ruled out by this list should investigate EXIT DS. It's a stylish gem that makes up for every moment of frustration with the warm pride you feel every time you get Mr Esc and the trapped souls that he must rescue safely to the much-ballyhooed exit.

Reviewed by Alan Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).