Seaside Bingo

Let's face it, the secret of bingo's popularity lies in the fact you might win large sums of money for a minimal wager. The bothersome box checking would be a pointless and unfulfilling experience without the enticing offer of untold riches – a bit like watching the National Lottery when you haven't bought a ticket.

Despite this obvious fact, Maturus has chosen to eschew financial rewards in favour of points, thereby focusing almost entirely on the numbers. Based loosely on cash bingo (which uses a 4x4 grid rather than the traditional 5x3), Seaside Bingo tries to recreate the atmosphere of a traditional holiday resort.

It starts off strongly, featuring a rousing rendition of 'I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside' on the title screen. Portraits of the different bingo callers bounce across the screen, suggesting an environment of fun and hilarity. These callers represent differing levels of difficulty, from 'easy' to 'demonic'.

Starting a new game takes you to the caller selection screen. First up is Suzie, a 19-year old beautician who enjoys modelling in her spare time. Suzie represents the easiest skill level, and calls the numbers out in frustratingly slow fashion. Featuring blonde hair and a rather large cleavage, Suzie seems to represent your stereotypical featherhead.

In fact, all of the callers seem like 1950s caricatures. For instance, Betty the dinnerlady – hobbies: pies (really? Us, too) – wouldn't be out of place in a Carry On movie. It's as if they've been lifted from those old-fashioned postcards you sometimes see outside seaside shops (try saying that quickly three times), usually containing sexist jokes or skits about mothers-in-law. Yet, sadly, these characters are underused and completely incidental to the game proper.

Anyway, making a selection takes you to a new screen where your caller invites you to pick three cards from a selection of 30. Each 4x4 grid-based card takes up approximately one quarter of your screen. The head and shoulders of your selected caller appear above your cards, calling out the numbers into a speech bubble in the top-left corner. Should a number on one of your grids be called, you can strike it off your sheet by moving the cursor over it and hitting the '5' key.

Cleverly, the game recognises if you have the same number on more than one card, automatically striking out the number in question on all three of your cards. Each number matched grants you a small number of points, rising by 50 for each level of difficulty. Four numbers in any diagonal, horizontal or vertical line is needed for victory, although you can continue until you have multiple lines for an additional points bonus.

Obviously, this would all be pretty pointless without some sort of challenge, so the final quarter of the playing area is taken up by an extra set of rotating grids. These represent cards belonging to your opponent who can also call bingo for a winning line. Should this happen, it's game over, a dynamic that adds a degree of strategy as you decide whether to call out for a single line or continue playing for bonus points.

Play continues in this manner until you've either gone through all 30 cards or lost to your faceless opponent. It quickly becomes tedious, with the only incentive being to beat the solitary high-score on the title screen.

Inspiring boredom is bad enough, but we've other issues with Seaside Bingo, too. Crucially, the playing area is a bit too confined on a mobile phone screen. The numbers can be difficult to pick out from their similarly looking neighbours. The white-on-orange colour scheme of the bingo cards doesn't exactly help here, either. Oddly, you can also pause the game after each number, giving you limitless time to search through the cluttered cards.

But these are mere drops in the ocean compared to Seaside Bingo's most dismal failure.

You see, after one of the numbers on your grid is checked, you can continue to press the '5' key while that square is highlighted, adding additional points to your score with every stroke. Considering the lack of a monetary prize, and that the only record of your achievements is that high-score, it's almost unbelievable that an error of this nature has slipped into the final code.

Still, it's perhaps not the disaster it sounds. Because even with that aside, the colourful characters and jaunty sounds of Seaside Bingo simply aren't sufficient to counter the dull gameplay or the headache-inducing, tightly-packed numbers on your screen. You'd therefore be infinitely wiser investing the money at your local bingo hall.