Harry Potter Mastering Magic

Some games are inevitable, and if you close your eyes you can almost picture the meeting where this one was devised.

"What does everybody like at the moment?" the producer asks. "Harry Potter," duly comes the answer. "Good," he goes on, "and what kind of mobile games are people playing these days?" "Casual games, sir."

"Hold onto your hats," the producer says. "I've had a genius idea."

And here it is. Harry Potter Mastering Magic is a collection of mini-games based in the hallowed chambers of Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and we mean that literally. There are no dragons to slay or bitter rivals to overthrow here; just lessons to attend and exams to sit. Rock on!

Eight mini-games feature in all, dressed up in Studious Success Cup mode as lessons during a school year. Although eight sounds like a fairly miserly number, the variety and originality of the ideas is surprising. To take Divination as an example, the object is to gaze into a crystal ball and identify which of the four items on display is appearing within.

The four objects might be a feather, a wizard's hat, a vanity mirror and a bottle, one of which will swim frantically in the ball until you identify it with '2', '4', '6', or '8'. This may seem straightforward, but it has taken skill to make the objects in the crystal ball both obscure and at the same time identifiable with concentration.

In some of the harder lessons, the swimming objects might differ only by an extra curl at the point of a hat or a pearl inlay at the top of a mirror, and the fact that these discrepancies are exactly difficult enough to spot is testament to solid design.

The range of lessons roughly covers the different aspects of conventional IQ tests, which is to say there are spatial, verbal, memory and mathematical tasks to complete, much like in the ubiquitous Brain Training on DS. In fact, while we won't presume to put this game up against the product of Dr Kawashima's considerable expertise, in terms of variety and imagination Harry wins hands down.

Even where the task itself is prosaic, it's well-dressed. Care of Magical Creatures, for instance, is just a simple game of sums, but the premise surrounding it has you crunching numbers in order to prepare the correct quantity of food to give to a dragon, who happily dips his head into the trough when you get an answer right.

Herbology is another mathematics task, but a highly original one. There are three plants of different heights in a row, and under each of them is a selection of green and red arrows, pointing respectively up and down. Each green represents a unit of growth, each red a unit of shrinkage, and the object is to work out which plant will grow tallest on the basis of their current height and the triangles beneath them. Potentially, this task could be enormously difficult, but on the whole the greens are distributed such that the answer is all but obvious.

And the same is true of every sub-game: they just never get very difficult.

All of the lessons are timed, with your mark tied to your speed, and each lesson consists of three goes at the sub-game in question, with every attempt earning commentary from an imperious but faceless teacher, and a certificate rating your performance as anything from 'outstanding' to 'troll', the lowest possible level of attainment.

Then, after 16 lessons, you have to sit your OWL, or 'Ordinary Wizarding Levels' exam, a succession of the same sub-games you've played for your lessons but harder, and of course loaded with pressure because your results will determine your career path.

Okay, so the threat of career failure probably won't trouble you much, but there is genuine tension during the OWLs, and this is the soul of the game. Without the exams, after which you get placed amongst your classmates, Harry Potter Mastering Magic would be an imaginative, intelligent, and well-presented game that falls short by failing to expand its own ideas.

Herbology is good, that is, but it's the same thing over and over. Doing sums to feed a dragon is a nice idea, but it's the only idea that Care of Magical Creatures contains. There should have been more.

However, the mechanic of playing game after game, honing your ability, and tracking your relative performance before throwing yourself into a one-chance, no going back, winner-takes-all challenge is inspired, and this feature adds magic to an otherwise merely worthy title.