Sally's Salon

We've had management games that get you serving sushi, pizza and cakes to an ever growing queue of impatient customers. Now here's a game tailored more at aspiring Victoria Beckhams. Sally's Salon puts you in charge of a beauty salon and all that goes with it - that's cutting and dying hair, filing nails, shaping eyebrows and tanning clients a fetching shade of orange, in case you've never ventured inside such a place.

As in similar games, none of this is as easy as it sounds. The customers steadily flocking through your door have a limited patience threshold, illustrated by five hearts above their heads. Those hearts gradually erode the longer they're left sitting in the waiting room, waiting for a blow dry or standing at the counter wanting to pay. So speed is of the essence. The faster you can move people through your salon, the more customers you can fit in and the more money and tips you rake in.

Sally's Salon has plenty of competition - and I'm not talking about Tracy's Salon down the road, I'm talking games such as Diner Dash 2 and Cake Mania 2 which already offer a fix of quick-fire customer serving. But this game is nowhere near as vacuous or dumb as you might imagine a game about a beauty technician might be.

For starters it looks good. It uses quirky cartoon visuals similar to games like Grey's Anatomy and Las Vegas Nights and as your clients pass through your salon's various stations they emerge with mohawks, purple hair and tanned skin, which is endlessly amusing to see.

The game is also has a fair amount of play incentive in the form of a shop you can visit after successfully finishing each level. In the shop, you spend your cash on all sorts of salon upgrades, from heated waiting room chairs to keep customers happy while they sit, to salon assistants who can wash and dry hair and make coffee, removing the need for you to waste your own precious time doing it.

You can also upgrade Sally's salon completely. After completing a certain number of levels, Sally moves onto a whole new salon. New salons bring a new layout to learn and new treatments, such as hair colouring and manicures, which - in turn - bring in more customers. As you buy more waiting room chairs and beauty stations in the shop, your salon is transformed - from small seedy high street outfit to a place busier than Asda on a Saturday afternoon, and building up your virtual business is strangely compelling.

For this reason, it's very easy to get absorbed in Sally's Salon. But - despite its draw - you can't help but feel that it doesn't really test your gaming skills very much.

The way the game works - you click on individual customers to move them to the area they want to go next, then click on them to order Sally to carry out their treatments - doesn't really take much effort.

While you do have to make sure backlogs aren't created by neglecting one area of the salon, and also look out for customers who are getting impatient and are about to walk out, you can quite easily get through levels by repeatedly clicking on customers. Because you can stack up Sally's actions, she'll then automatically move around making sure everyone is dealt with.

For younger gamers, the almost non-existent difficulty level of the main game won't be a problem. Everyone else will probably start suffering brain rot after the tenth level, although the game's Survival mode - where it's Game Over if you lose one customer - is much more challenging.

Sally's Salon is still fun and you'll happily while away the hours playing it. But it's a laidback kind of a game that doesn't ever get the adrenaline pumping - a bit more like having a relaxing massage yourself than running a busy business.