AMA Pulling Power

Getting 'lucky' with a lady or gentleman is no longer about getting tanked up out on the town and stumbling home with someone who, at the time, looks like they have four eyes and 20 fingers. No, technology now plays Cupid in our lives, with the internet being dominated by websites where we can sell our emotional and physical wares.

Of course, even scoring that elusive first date is no guarantee of success, whether you're looking for full blown romance or something just a little more temporary. How you behave on that first date or chance encounter is crucial, and AMA has taken it upon itself to offer up a guide with assorted tips and tricks on how to impress your prospective other half. That's assuming you're attracted to men and women lifted straight from Beverly Hills 90210, that is.

Yes, while Pulling Power seemingly plays to an audience of pre-teen American girls. Pink and light purples adorning every menu screen and music that wouldn't be out of place on a boy band's album playing gleefully in the background, it seems obsessed with pushing men clearly addicted to steroids and girls who look made for a future in Stepford upon its players. If this is love, then love is plastic.

Love is also trying to con people into thinking that you have the qualities they seek in a partner. And apparently, they're the same five qualities for everyone. If you play Pulling Power's main mode, which focuses on picking up someone at a neighbour's party, then you learn fairly quickly that both men and women seek partners who are romantic, funny, sporty, spontaneous and smart. That's most of the British population out of the equation, then.

Players can choose three of the five qualities that they think apply to them, with the challenge then being the need to prove that they actually apply. Proving said qualities revolves around giving answers to scenarios that AMA thinks are relevant to the trait in question. Each scenario – of which there are three – has three possible responses, which the development team has graded by handing out points.

What AMA considers to be the top answer scores 5,000 points, while the so-so option hands out 2,000 points. The 'wrong' response is rewarded with just 1,000 points, though in essence it doesn't seems to matter how well a player does – in every play test I conducted, I was informed that I'd done well, even if I failed to get just one top answer.

Getting the top answer isn't as easy as it might sound, either. In all of Pulling Power's modes, the options provided are often more than a little off the wall, seemingly baring little relation to how a person might react in a certain situation. Indeed, it's often the most random answer that turns out to be the 'right' one, making it incredibly hard to prove your romantic prowess.

However, there's more to Pulling Power than just answering questions. Say you're sporty, for instance, and you'll be challenged to a game of darts; players are faced with two sliding scales – one slowly moving up and down, the other left to right. Throwing a high score is a matter of waiting for the two gauges to meet up over your target – presumably triple 20.

Various other tasks are matched up to whatever traits you pick. Spontaneity, for instance, is measured by matching the pattern of a random light sequence. If that's not enough evidence that Pulling Power isn't to be taken too seriously, then I don't know what is. AMA has also attempted to go a little further than mere seduction techniques, also providing a mode that will rate your compatibility with real life prospects.

Consisting of 30 questions (15 delving into how you act around him or her, and 15 enquiring about their response), the game uses your answers to diagnose your chances with the person in question. That said, as before, the answers available are often a leap away from logic, meaning responding in a way that relates to any kind of reality is a challenge in itself.

Personally, I'd question the sanity of anyone using Pulling Power as a serious tool for seduction, but as a harmless bit of fun, AMA has done its job. There's certainly a sickly element to the way the game is presented – one that, if lingered on, could verge on the slightly seedy – but as a quick fairly superficial sidetrack to the intricacies of real-life love, Pulling Power manages to hold its own.