Those familiar with the first title will be right at home the moment they start playing. Each stage, or skin, still has groups of duel coloured shapes that vary in combination. These fall into the play field and once the matching colours are combined into blocks of four, they are periodically removed by the time bar that sweeps over the field. In essence that’s Lumines – Tetris for the modern generation that works incredibly well thanks to the melding of simplicity, bold colours and music.

So while nothing has changed in terms of gameplay, the real and noteworthy alterations in the sequel are where it matters the most - the skins and music. Lumines II features a plethora of new skins; these range from the sublime and heady 'Cuckoo Clock', the kazoo-laden and schoolyard chanting oriental chimes of 'Naha', the up tempo dance of 'The Mission to the Moon' complete with its faint reminiscent stirrings of Castlevania 4’s soundtrack, and the growling faux-New Metal shrieking of 'Stroll Around The World'. As before, there is a large variation between the styles and music, which taken on their own, or together, work wonderfully. Just as with the original, in order to get the most out of the tunes and the game itself, playing with headphones is vital due to the PSP’s woefully inadequate speakers.

There is a heavy and (if you stop to think about it for too long) confusing degree of cross-pollination between this game and its predecessors. Some of the skins will be familiar to those who have spent time with Lumines Live on the 360’s Live Arcade, with a lot of the skins also appearing here. The game includes some returning favourites from the first such as Just and Roundabout, which have been tweaked slightly in terms of colours or difficulty. Speaking of Lumines Live, Lumines II also has an identical interface and menu layout although thankfully minus the Stephen Hawkins/Johnny 5 crossover as the announcer. The main difference being that Lumines II is free of the controversy of micro transactions and comes as a complete package. From the start, the PSP version is equipped with the full CPU challenge and puzzle modes, along with the three main difficulty modes, B, A and S. In fact the only alteration that’s been made which seems out of place is the aping of Live’s Gamertag system. Now the PSP’s profile name is permanently used as the players tag, so unlike the original all scores are attributed to the one player. While this isn’t a deal breaker, it’s certainly an odd decision and will no doubt annoy those who enjoyed passing their system around the room to see if anyone could beat their high score. This can be overcome by playing against someone in Ad-hoc mode, but it would have been nice to have been given a choice.

The game also includes the Skin edit mode, which allows players to select which unlocked skins they wish to play, in what order and whether to play them in one-off rotation or in a loop. This is a nice way of customising the gameplay experience, but the mode has a tendency to chop the end off some of the tracks which can be particularly annoying if in the middle of your Lumines groove.

New to this iteration are the music video skins. These can include simple imagery such as splashing water and tide swept beaches or, more noticeably, commercial tunes from established music artists which are played in the background. While it was never possible that these songs would be to everyone's tastes, there's no denying that the selection is diverse and with some interesting choices. Undeniably some feel like they have been done for blatant commercial appeal such as Gwen Stefani's 'Holla Back Girl', and 'Pump It' by urban-funkstars the Black Eyed Peas. However even these work well and it doesn’t feel as if they have been crow-bared in, surely a testament to Lumines own musical diversity itself rather than the artists or song selections. Thankfully there’s also a mixture of older and surprising choices such as Beck’s 'Black Tambourine', The Go! Team’s 'BottleRocket', New Order’s 'Regret' and The Chemcial Brother’s 'Star Guitar'.

However all these are trumped by Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s own collaboration with the Genki Rockets for Heavenly Star, which shows off a flare for sound and vision that even some established artists lack. The tune is certainly on a par with the original games Shinin and love it or hate it, it’s one that it’ll be jammed in your head for days, or even weeks, afterwards.

Heavenly Star demonstrates in one deft blow that Lumines II doesn’t necessarily need the top name artists to do the music video inclusions justice. In fact it would be nice to see them go out on a limb and take a similar tact in future with original fully produced songs and videos. Regardless, unless you absolutely detest an artist and the song in question, or are totally narrow minded in your musical tastes (in which case Lumines may not even be the game for you), more often than not you'll be too busy lining up combinations of blocks to even worry about the songs.

Lumines II shows that the game has lost none of its appeal since its initial release, and the music videos really do feel like the next-step and part of a natural progression. Those who didn’t like the original will find nothing here to change their mind, but existing Lumines converts will no doubt find themselves falling for the game all over again.