Of all the possible film licenses that could be turned into a box-pushing mobile puzzle game, The Mummy seems like it would be the absolute worst choice. The movie's over five years old, and neither its campy, computerized action sequences nor the comical fumbling of Brendan Fraser's clueless protagonist engage your critical-thinking skills in the slightest. All the same, developer Indiagames went and made a pretty tasty action/puzzle game out of the lemon it was handed. The Mummy fuses together a number of conventional puzzle elements with a light touch of action to come up as a fairly lengthy, challenging, and enjoyable adventure.

Solve puzzles...by looting Egyptian artifacts!

In The Mummy, you play as Rick and Evelyn, the latter an intrepid Egyptologist and the former a boilerplate action hero. The duo wanders through the strangely well-lit corridors of an ancient Egyptian tomb, searching for artifacts, fighting off mummies, and solving a variety of puzzles. There's also a bit of a story arc associated with the adventure, which involves the resurrection of the evil pharaoh Imhotep. This inclusion does most mobile action/puzzle games one better, but it's not important to the overall goal of this game, which never really wavers from curio collecting.

In true action/puzzle style, The Mummy makes some limited advances toward team-based puzzle-solving. For instance, your two heroes have nominally different abilities: Rick's pistol does more damage to baddies than do Evy's throwing knives, but only Evy is capable of reading certain tablets or using special teleportation devices. You can switch between the two of them with a simple button press, kind of like you do in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga for the GBA. Unlike that game, though, the only real reason that you have two characters in The Mummy is so one of them can be kidnapped about halfway into the story. Almost none of the game's many puzzles require the coordinated use of the two heroes' abilities.

That's OK, though, because there's enough classic action/puzzle content here to keep an average mobile gamer busy for three hours or more. You'll encounter a large number of fairly standard box-moving puzzles that require you to move specific (or generic) boxes onto particular squares, working around the constraints of the room and the obstacles therein; alternately, you may be asked to construct a figure out of component boxes to unlock a door. Another variant you'll run into are the teleporter network puzzles, which are best solved through experimentation. The difficulty of these puzzles ramp up nicely over the course of the adventure. They become truly fiendish toward the end of the game, and will probably require you to reenter a room many times for a reset. Still, they are designed well enough to make you want to pound your brain against them until one or the other fractures. The action component of the game is fairly breezy, given that you have more than enough health to deal with your painfully stupid enemies, and you're also faster than them. Some of the puzzle and maze sequences are timed, requiring you to be fast with your fingers in a few instances.

There are plenty of mummies in this game, but they're not at all scary.

Visually, The Mummy shares the same clean, simplified look of most of Indiagames' portfolio. The colors are bright in the Series 60 Java version of the game, and the character and background art is pleasingly functional, if spartan. Unfortunately, the game is lacking in the sound department. There's only a brief, quiet title theme and a few hushed sound effects in the entire game, all of which are built out of basic MIDI tones. It's better than nothing, but still pretty weak.

If you like puzzle games that involve a bit of action on the side, it's a good bet that you'll enjoy The Mummy. This game doesn't overextend itself in any way, but it's a solid design achievement all the way around.