The Brak Show

A certain form of friendship is everything these days. Frankly, you're not anyone unless you're being added to a friends list, poked, high-fived or turned into a zombie. Sometimes we wonder what's wrong with keeping in contact with a phone call, or, more shockingly, meeting up.

But maybe we're just showing our age – there's little doubt that sites such as Facebook are great ways to keep in touch with friends, or indeed make new ones.

And despite the strange behaviour of Brak and his side-kick Zorak, they'd make ideal online chums. Well, let's face it, would you want to be friends with the space cat villain and the sociopathic preying mantis in real life?

That's the point of The Brak Show, a mini-game-focused experience based around the characters and situations from Adult Swim's cult, late-night animated series

Like a version of The Sims for the middle-aged manga generation, your goal is to increase your attributes and make friends. You accomplish this by completing a variety of mini-games and tasks, which builds up your affinity ratings in terms of money, coolness, and good and evil deeds. You can only have a friendship rating as high as the lowest of the attributes that your friends favour.

Also in a similar manner to The Sims, your relationships are highlighted in a simple, graphical way. If the numbers under the character's face are white, it means you have a normal, acquaintance-style relationship. Yellow means you're friends, green means good friends, and blue signifies you're best friends. At the other end of the spectrum, purple shows the character is your enemy, red a sworn enemy, and black a nemesis.

Once you have good enough attributes for a specific character, you can then talk to them in the form of a side-scrolling game where you have to collect smiling faces. Reach the target and your friendship for the character will increase. Played over and over, this mini-game also speeds up on each attempt, as you look to gain a greater friendship rating. The more friendly you want to be, the harder you have to work.

In terms of the structure around this activity, you start out in Brak's bedroom. From there you go into the kitchen to meet his mum and dad, as is customary in the TV show. You leave the house through the kitchen and when you do this you're presented with a small map of the neighbourhood. Each of the locations becomes available as you progress through the game. You can also interact with parts of the environment, although in our opinion there's not enough of this sort of thing.

No, it's essentially all about the mini-games.

There's a memory event, packaged in the guise of a beat-'em-up that Brak is playing. The idea is to remember the numbers that are displayed and input them, thus delivering a hit to your opponent. Another mini-game requires you to take control of a goldfish and collect fish food while simultaneously avoiding the lumps of ham raining down. Yes, ham.

Control-wise, input via the thumbstick can be a little cumbersome, especially in the mini-games that are more twitchy (such as picking up the parts from Thundercheese's lawn). But this could've have been because of the limitations of our Sony Ericsson K750i.

Whatever phone you're using, though, it won't be too long before the constant diet of mini-games starts to wear a little thin. After all, there's only so many times taking control of a ham-avoiding goldfish is fun. Meaning that while there's definitely something here for fans of the TV series, for the rest of us, The Brak Show doesn't quite develop into the quirky game we were hoping for.