Funfair Games 12-Pack

Digital Chocolate games are often very simple to play. Games like Kamikaze Robots and Tornado Mania 3D use just one button, Bumper Car City uses two and American Pie: Naked Run stretches to a whopping three.

You could say the mobile publisher has cottoned-on to the fact that simple is the way to go when designing a mobile game - at least when it comes to the controls. Having played mobile games that try to cram in a whole ten button experience and leave you mashing the wrong keys as a consequence, we have to say we agree.

However, it can't always be easy to come up with ideas for games that support a limited control system. And some of Funfair Games 12-Pack's games do feel a touch constrained.

The thing is, it's good. But it feels like it could have been great - like a Point Blank game for mobile - if just a few of the games had been better (which could maybe have been achieved with a few more buttons) and there were more difficulty levels than the game's standard 'Easy' on offer.

Funfair Games 12-Pack, as its title suggests, comes with 12 different fairground (and arcade) themed mini-games. These are strung together with a funfair theme in which your cutesy character makes his or her way around a fairground, visiting different events and trying to win bronze, silver and gold trophies in order to open more games.

The whole fairground is unlockable by anyone over the age of 12 with minimal effort in about 20 minutes. But there's re-playability in the form of unlockable achievements, a two-player point-beating mode (which is the mode that reminded us of Point Blank as it's quite similar) and just trying to win all-gold trophies.

These mini-games vary in quality. Most are unashamedly unoriginal with games such as Whack-A-Mole, Duck Shooting and Bloxx (like Tetris, but with coloured blocks that need matching up to make them disappear). But lack of originality isn't really a problem - you can always view them as nostalgia hits as opposed to rip-offs of games gone by - and they're fun versions of those games.

Nostalgia is especially present in some of the arcade games such as Ski - reminiscent of Horace Goes Skiing among others - and Galaxy, which is like a simpler version of Space Invaders crossed with any generic scrolling space shooter.

There aren't any really duff games here, but the target games - played by pressing '5' when an automatically-moving target shrinks and turns green - are a bit uninspiring and could maybe have benefited from those extra buttons.

Then some others which sound weak - like Ring the Bell, where you simply press the numbers '4' and '6' as they appear as quickly as possibly - are actually quite addictive. The difficulty levels of all the games never reaches very tough heights though, so older gamers won't find their skills are particularly stretched.

But for younger gamers, Funfair Games is pretty, colourful and simple to play with clear goals and rewards. It doesn't manage to tread the tightrope games like Office Wars manage to tread so well and please both kids and adults alike, but then it's only the exceptional ones that do and Funfair Games is good as opposed to exceptional.