You know that kind of insanely happy Californian voice that coats your ears with forced sincerity like so much golden syrup? The melodiously upbeat tones of someone so unnervingly cheerful that you can hear their teeth? Well, she narrates Fantavision, and it's testament to the charms of this beautiful and addictive little firecracker of a puzzle game that even her cloyingly joy-joy tones cannot dent its appeal.

Let's not mince words here. Fantavision is cute. In fact, it doesn't so much play the 'cute' card as throw the whole pack at us. With an intro and inter-level movies showing the kind of perfect US nuclear unit that makes most of our own stunted family trees look ready for felling, and a pastel rich, round-cornered smorgasbord of Fifties styling, you would be forgiven for thinking that you've just loaded the worst kind of 'family' game - 'family' being a euphemism for 'bland'. Big mistake, being if you have a weakness for puzzlers Fantavision is the multicoloured equivalent of crack cocaine. Your 'just one more go' gland will be horribly over-stimulated, and your dreams will be filled with the most colourful explosions.

As with all the best puzzle games, the concept if extremely simple. You have to link together chains of ascending fireworks and detonate them to create crowd-pleasing displays. Allow your rockets to fizzle out without triggering them and an energy/popularity bar will reduce by degrees. If the bar disappears, your game and the display is over. Keep popping the rockets with a minimum of wastage for the display's allotted time and you'll get to move on to the next location. That is the basic idea. Of course, playing it is not that simple. Not anywhere near.

Rockets or shells come in three colours - red, blue and green - and to detonate the simplest combination you need to link at least three of a single shade. This linking of flares is called a 'daisy'. As the screen fills with multicoloured shells you'll find that to avoid a rapidly shrinking energy bar you need to combine daisies. But wait - to do this and rack up the points you need rainbow rockets. These winking wonders act like wild cards, enabling you to detonate various different colours in the same string. When you consider that a 'four daisy' combination will involve linking at least fifteen rockets before any one of them splutters out, and thus breaking the whole chain, it's plain to see how hard 'simple' can become.

Bonuses arrive with high-scoring combos, and will either boost your energy bar or help you spell out the word 'STARMINE' at the bottom of the screen. Once lit, you'll enter a mini-game where large numbers of single coloured shells will find your view. Detonate as many as you can and you'll return to the main game healthier and wealthier.

Although colour coded, this 'linking elements' business will be familiar to puzzle gamers the world over. Where Fantavision really breaks new ground is the area where so many puzzle games fall flat - graphics and style. Play it for a while and you'll become aware that this is achieved at two distinct levels. While you are immersed mid-game, it's a classically abstract puzzle experience. All you're likely to see are these clusters of drifting lights that you need to make sense of with split-second timing. Take a step back, though, and it's just gorgeous to look at. Whether you're watching someone else play (entertaining in itself) or soaring around your own pyrotechnic handywork in the thorough, feature-packed Replay mode, you can't help but feel ooohs and aaahs form on your lips.

Graphically, Sony has skilfully tapped into mitten-wearing, forsty-breathed child in all of us, offering cascading blooms of light that are a joy to watch. The environments, too, are an expansive, detailed mixture of cityscapes and gravity defying, outer space vistas. For once, it seems, we have a triumph of style and content.

Of course, in any display there are going to be a couple of damp squibs, and Fantavision is no exception. The first is the decision not to allow you to save the game and resume from your best position. Complete a level and you can save it to memory card, but this only allows you to access it in replay. Although this cranks up the desire to keep on playing, it does mean that completing the game needs a sizeable chunk of uninterrupted free time. An annoying but understandable move when you consider the other potential downside - at only eight levels (16 if you play on 'hard'), the game isn't exactly long. Visually lush and highly playable though Fantavision undoubtedly is, it isn't anywhere near perfect.

Sony's inclusion of a two-player mode negates some of these shortfalls to a certain extent, and in a sense the random beauty of the game will encourage replay. But it's a shame that, with just a few more levels, and an acknowledgement that not everyone has hours and hours of seam-free gaming time to spare, this gem would've been hard to fault. As it is, Fantavision is addictive, innovative and very playable. More than that, it's a game that suggests the Emotion Engine will be more than a buzz phrase and live up to its name.

1. Beautiful to look at
2. Addictive to play
3. Refreshingly innovative
4. A great idea, executed in considerable style

1. Lack of a mid-game save option grates
2. It could do with more levels. Why limit the fun?

Graphics 80%
You've never seen anything like this before!

Sound 70%
Laid-back tunes and evocative whizz-bang FX.

Gameplay 80%
Simple, but gets under your skin in no time.

Lifespan 50%
No lasting challenge to serious gamers.

Overall 70%
Thanks to its modest size, Fantavision isn't quite a must-own game. Even so, you really should consider it - just for its original concept and playability.