Paris Nights

Gameloft has ticked off the biggest US attractions in its Nights series, visiting New York, Miami and Las Vegas. Now it seems it's ready for a touch of culture and is delivering by heading off to Paris, home of fine wine, romance, tasty pastries and bicycles.

Despite the change of scenery, though, the game's premise remains the same. Paris Nights is, like its predecessors, a social simulation with more than a sprinkling of influence from The Sims.

Playing as your own created male or female character, you head off to Paris in search of a new, more cultured life and, along the way, spend time building your charisma, buying better clothes and - of course - using the toilet.

The more tasks you complete to build up your various personality traits, the better other characters react to you and the more the city opens up to you. It's like real life expressed as a formula. Money + nicely blow-dried hair + big muscles = success formula.

So, you begin the game as a nobody with a suitcase and nowhere to live, then progress by talking to people and picking up objectives to complete and also by carrying out actions to bolster your character's lengthy list of attributes.

Throughout the game there are branches and choices to make, most of which revolve around the fact you can't be cultured and fit, or like fashion and clubbing and art and culture.

You also can't be kind and go around stealing from street vendors. This means it's up to you to decide how you want your character to turn out.

If you want them to be kind, give money to tramps in the street. If you want to have sex appeal, spend time working on your appearance and go around 'making out' with random members of the opposite sex. Paris Nights is nothing if not open ended.

Of course, while there are multiple activities you can get up to wandering around the most famous of Paris's landmarks, such as the Champs-Elysees, Eiffel Tower and Louvre, the game's basic storyline stays the same no matter what you do.

There are always objectives - marked with a star - that you need to complete to progress the story and there's no escaping them. You just get to spice things up by looking for hidden collectables, talking to other characters and spending money on whatever you fancy in the eShop.

Players of the previous games in the series will be used to the sheer amount there is to do while newcomers will only be impressed by how much is packed into this mobile game.

Overall it's a lot of fun with a lot of tongue-in-cheek conversations and interactions and vast map-fulls of colourful visuals. There are just a few criticisms.

The vast number of different personality and needs bars are sometimes difficult to manage. For example, in one early mission you need to have a certain amount of sex appeal before a key character will talk to you, but it's not clear how you increase your sex appeal.

Finally, after some failed attempts at dancing, weight lifting and flirting your way to sexiness, you discover you just needed to do your hair.

The game suffered occasional slowdown on the handset we reviewed it on too - and there are frequent loading screens, which aren't too long but are there every time you leave one area for a new one.

Paris Nights is still tres bien though, and in no way a departure from the quality of the previous games. It doesn't move things on much (except for introducing a more comprehensive clothes and furniture shop where you can spend money) - instead it just offers a new playground to explore and story to complete which, for fans of the genre started by The Sims, will mean hours of addictively gratuitous, lightly voyeuristic gaming.