Bikini Beach Party

What's the best way to chat up women on the beach? Ask them if they come here often? Offer to rub suntan lotion into their backs? Buy them an ice cream?

Don't confuse those last two, mind – for some reason romance rarely springs from smearing a Cornetto over someone's shoulders...

Bouncing a woman on a blanket while purposely aiming her at a variety of soft fruit is probably equally low on the list of successful beach-based seduction techniques, but that hasn't stopped Digital Chocolate from using it as the basis for Bikini Beach Party.

The scenario is simple. You've borrowed your rich uncle's beach mansion, and naturally you're planning a party. You've got nibbles, crates of booze and Supertramp's Greatest Hits – all you need are some females. So it's off down the beach with your blanket to bag yourself some babes.

Gameplay-wise, Bikini Beach Party is supremely simple. You move left and right with the blanket to ensure you bounce the subject of your advances at an appropriate angle to, er, collect as much fruit as possible. It's like a mix of Breakout, Bubble Bobble and Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion (the place, not a game).

To determine whether the girl agrees to come back to your party, you have to beat a certain points tally within a time limit; each fruit is worth a different amount, and there are extra icons to boost your score or affect the gameplay. For example, a clock icon freezes the timer for a few seconds, while a girl icon makes another girl jump in so you have two on the go at once. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mobile game to feature a trampoline-based swimwear threesome, at least unless there's a secret level in Platinum Sudoku that we haven't found yet.

For each level you complete within the time limit, you entice one girl back to your lair – sorry, mansion. Do really well, and two will come back. And at any time between levels, you can check the mansion to see who's there and get suitably flirty banter from any woman you click on.

Bikini Beach Party is fun, simple to grasp and there's well-worked progression in the way new features and icons are introduced in each level. However, the core gameplay can get a bit repetitive. Although in theory you're encouraged to try levels again to get the two girls instead of one, in practice we didn't rush to do that.

It's not necessarily a fault within the game, in that this is a fun title designed for short-term summer gameplay – an ideal way to while away a few hours on a real beach while avoiding talking to real women. (Try Tower Bloxx, from the same developer, for a longer challenge).