Connect 4

The mystery of Connect 4 is this: it's one of the hardest board games to play tactically, and yet its audience is made up of children – who are patently idiots. A Connect 4 set, with its bright primary colours and cascading counters, is all about tactile pleasure. The game itself is secondary.

Not so with this mobile version. There are no counters to make into towers while your opponent moves, no plastic 'thunks' as they slide into place, and no clatter of cascading pieces at the end. The game is all there is, so it had better be as good as we remember.

There's very little a computer conversion of Connect 4 can get wrong, and developer Hands On has played it safe. There are no extra modes aside from the mandatory three of Easy, Hard, and Expert, and no striking visual effects beyond the fact that the counters perpetually spin, and go up in flames when four of the same colour line up.

The controls, meanwhile, are equally straightforward: '4' and '6' select a column, and '5' drops the counter in.

If you've ever played Connect 4, there are no surprises here, then. For those who haven't, let's review the game itself.

Based loosely on noughts and crosses (or Tic-tac-toe, if you're American), Connect 4's vertical board comprises seven columns into which you can slot six counters. Each player has either red or yellow to play with, and the object is to get four in a diagonal, horizontal, or vertical line before your opponent does.

Aside from a greater number of squares in its grid, Connect 4 has one significant element that noughts and crosses doesn't: gravity. Rather than going exactly where you want them to, the counters go to the lowest available spot in each column.

The difficulty lies in knowing where to take your first few moves. In an empty board, it's impossible to know how your opponent will move and therefore impossible to plan. Every time you try to make a line, all your opponent needs to do is drop a counter at the end or in the middle and you're scuppered.

Once a few counters are down and the board is starting to fill, things become more involved. A player can continue to block his opponent, but situations inevitably unfold in which one player will get a line if the other is forced to drop a counter to prop-up their line-maker. Here, between amateurs, it generally descends into a game of she-loves-me-not in which the winner is whomever fortune favours with the final petal.

With experience, you can learn how to manufacture favourable situations, however, and as with noughts and crosses all you need to do is master a couple of simple principles in order to virtually guarantee a good player a run for his money.

All of this, then, is contained in Hands On's Connect 4, and very little else. The presentation is fine, crisp, and colourful, and the sound effects more than adequate. There's a pass-the-handset multiplayer mode for when you want to test your skills and against another member of your species, and the three difficulty levels are sensibly stepped.

If we were looking for faults, we'd perhaps gripe about how slowly the counters fall, or the lack of wireless multiplayer, but such criticisms would be churlish. This game is let down by a lack of ambition, sure, and a kind of howling optionlessness that's impossible to ignore, but if all you're after is a nice game of Connect 4, you won't go wrong.