Candace Kane’s Candy Factory is a beat-the-clock puzzle game in the mode of Cake Mania or Airport Mania. These kind of games are often described as having “Lucy in the chocolate factory” game play. In this case, that’s almost literally true.

The title character -- Candace ‘Candy’ Kane -- has taken over the family candy manufacturing business. The Kane family has been making award-winning candies for generations and Candace intends to keep that tradition going ... she just needs your help as the manager of her candy factory.

‘Managing’ actually involves filling orders for the customers who come in to the combination factory/store. Candace stands behind the register and the customers make their wishes known by way of thought balloons which appear over their heads. In each customer’s balloon you’ll see some combination of desired candies -- a peppermint, a jelly-bean, and a star for example. On the other side of the screen, a moving conveyor belt is filled with an endless line of moving candies. As manager, you have to rearrange the candies to get one set in the same order as the customer’s thought balloon. Once you do that, a bag appears on the counter between the customer and Candace. Click on the bag, click on Candace and the order is filled. The faster you fill the order, the larger your tip. Customers have limited patience, though, and if you take too long to fill the order the customer will get disgusted and leave.

The goal of each stage of the game is to make a set amount of money before the clock runs out. The more efficiently you play, the higher your tips and the more likely you are to meet the goal. Lose too many customers and you’ll be playing the level again.

Once you’ve played the first couple of levels, you’ve covered most of the mechanics of Candy Factory. There are minor variations ... new customers, the ability to purchase machines to make your job easier, stackable candies that yield higher scores, and the opportunity to put some candy on sale. None of these change the game play in any significant way.

Nor do the address the annoying audio. Each customer has a fixed dialogue which you will hear over and over and over and over. Play the game long enough and you’ll start chanting these lines in your sleep. Varied dialogue (or characters who stopped talking altogether) would have made the game more endurable.

Also worth noting is the fact that the customers’ thought-bubbles are distressingly small on a TV screen. Players may find themselves straining to identify the candies in the bubbles and might occasionally miss an order because they can’t tell what a customer really wants.

Candy Factory is a decent, if uninspired, example of its genre. There is nothing particularly outstanding, but nothing particularly annoying either. As a sweet treat, this one ranks above broccoli, but somewhere beneath gumdrops.