Larry Beach Volley

Like many perverts, Leisure Suit Larry is older than the majority of his peers. Now at the stately age of 20, he's travelled far since he first appeared on the scene in the 1980s to occupy a vacant niche for adolescent titillation in the largely unsupervised medium of video game.

A long-time resident of swish, sun-soaked resorts, Larry Laffer is an apparently wealthy middle-aged man of middling intelligence and average looks. For the first 15 or so years since we met him, his life has generally taken quixotic shape. Because Larry is short on sexual magnetism, finding a woman has always entailed a convoluted series of puzzles and tasks terminating, for the most part, in failure.

After several years of stumbling along profusely forking roads, Larry Beach Volley shows us a man finally at his destination. All he has to do now is manage a team of female beach volleyballers as they attempt to win the beach volley league. Aside from choosing players and occasionally appearing onscreen during a match to offer encouragement or criticism, Larry barely figures in the action at all.

Although the girls seem happy in their roles, Larry's conduct towards them frequently blurs the line between quaintly retrograde and downright sinister.

Before each round of the competition, you're given the opportunity to 'buy' girls from a giggling line-up. After every match, you have the opportunity to 'massage' the athletes in a ribald Simon-says sub-game in which pressing the left cursor, say, prompts a hand to reach up and squeeze the girl's left breast (or buttock, if she is laying face down.)

Successfully following the directional prompts induces the girls to say, "Hmm, that's great Larry, don't stop." At which point the sub-game is over, and he stops.

The rank simplicity of this sub-game epitomises Larry Beach Volley's gameplay throughout. The volleyball works much like taking a swing in a basic golf game. When the girls are about to receive a ball or spike one over the net, a bar appears at the bottom of the screen containing graduating degrees of accuracy and a line that sweeps from left to right.

Like Jump: Free Running, Larry Beach Volley has cannibalised control mechanics from different genres in order to make something that suits the mobile's modest keypad, and the resulting creation works fairly well.

A good shot is one in which you manage to stop the line inside the narrow, central section of the bar. It isn't possible to move players around the court or decide the direction of shots, so play is effectively an exercise in timing and reactions.

Getting it right is surprisingly tricky, and the difficulty curve is skewed by the mystifying fact that, win or lose, your girls will continue to ascend the leaderboard to face increasingly skilled opponents.

With unexceptional gameplay, pitiful sound, and cloned sprites standing like mannequins on the sand, Larry Beach Volley is asking for trouble. However, it has the wildcard of bawdy appeal to play. Like a Carry On film, it appears to hold criticism in contempt. "Who needs the critics' approval," it seems to say, "when the people are the ones who count, and they've been keeping me in business for 20 years."