Backstage

Getting backstage at your typical indie rock gig is something that is entirely different for the male gender than it is for the female. Seeing as so many of today's bands consist of horny teenage boys barely out of puberty, it is usually the sharp cheekboned fashionista femmes that are asked backstage and not the shoe-gazing knights of Oxfam chic.

If any guys do manage to blag an invite to join the party, they can expect to be wholly ignored by the band, whilst moustachioed surly bouncers and matey band manager types lurk on the periphery, doing their best to seduce the girls who have been cast off from the elite warm little centre that the light of the party crowds around. The best most can hope for is copious amounts of free canned lager.

The new rhythm action title, Backstage, for mobiles, does not come with any free booze, but what it does do is enable you to experience the party from the other side of the room, as it were, putting you in the shoes of a musician babe magnet. The set up is therefore simple, rhythm action and backstage naked girls (no, not that kind of rhythm action).

The burgeoning popularity of rhythm-based games make the arrival of a mobile take on the genre less than unexpected. The gameplay is straightforward: there are four notes, each of a different colour, that scroll across the screen in a sequence; four keys on the phone are ascribed to the notes (one to each); and as the notes pass by, you have to key the corresponding notes in time with the music. In addition, power-ups appear, increasing your points if activated in conjunction with a correctly entered sequence.

As you hit correct notes, a small heart starts to fill in the top of the screen. There is a ticking clock and the aim is to fill the heart by getting as many notes correct as possible before the timer runs out. If you succeed, you are rewarded with a naughty picture of an attractive young lady who is apparently turned on by a man who is handy with is thumbs. As you'd expect, frankly.

Beginning in a seedy club before progressing through to a larger venue and eventually a stadium, there are three backstage girls each with four images to be unlocked, giving the game its 12 short levels split into three sections.

Although hard to grasp to begin with due to vague pre-game instructions and imprecise in-game indicators of when to hit the notes, Backstage does prove to be a fun little game and one that at first seems to pose a decent challenge.

The problem is that if ever you don't succeed in filling a heart before the time runs out, you start the section again from where you left off. At first, this seems like a good idea in that you never have to repeat a section too many times, but as you start to progress rapidly through the levels, it becomes clear that even hitting the keys randomly would result in passing the level after enough attempts (that is how we passed the last level, although in reality we weren't hitting the keys randomly, just really badly and out of sequence.)

The player is never punished, meaning that even the most hamfisted gamer with a notion of rhythm worse than a Pop Idol reject can easily finish the game in half an hour. The inclusion of a single track (a cardinal sin for a game themed so heavily on music) also lets Backstage down.

The game is well presented and being able to go back and look at unlocked pictures in a gallery option is a nice touch. Also, completing the game unlocks all of the stages so that if you want you can play any of the three four-levelled stages to try and better your high score.

Not a bad effort at all, Backstage is sadly undermined by a non-existent difficulty bar and a solitary musical score that could have easily been joined by a couple of extra tracks. A fair stab at a rhythm action title, then, but something tells us that the best of that genre on mobiles is yet to come.