Forever Friends: Love Letter

As the largest company in the US churning out greetings cards and also the owner of Crayola-brand crayons and a cable TV channel that surely no one watches, Hallmark has its fingers in a few pies. But if you were going to name the one thing it's most famous for, it would be the sickly cute Forever Friends bear greetings cards.

It's hard to imagine they sell quite as many as they used to back in the dark ages of very little choice of birthday cards though (just sentimental or 'funny'). For a start, that new grey bear with the blue nose is cuter.

So, what to do with a big headed bear instantly recognisable by millions across the world but which no longer sells many birthday cards? Make him into a mobile game of course.

Of course, Forever Friends bears aren't known for much other than gracing greetings cards so it would be odd if they were suddenly to appear in a platform game doffing up evil bears or the like. More aptly, then, this game is about writing love letters and then posting them.

Yes, it's safe to say this concept combined with visuals that use every shade of pastel known to man will send teenage boys running for the hills retching. Does the game bode better for its target audience though? Well, not really.

Forever Friends has you guiding a floating letter around a maze. This is done by using '4' and '6' to tilt and rotate the maze, allowing gravity to send the letter in the direction you want it to go.

As you go, several good and bad objects get in the way. There are red hearts, which make your letter nicer; blue and green hearts, which zap a percentage of your letter's warmth; and depressing thoughts, which presumably turn your love letter into a suicide note.

There are also generic enemies that end the level if you run into them, and circular items which - in the words of the game - make your day either easier or harder, you never know! Great, thanks for that.

All of this might sound quite pleasant, if a little saccharine. But it's really not as harmless as it seems.

For starters, each level's objectives are too samey, being as they are variants of collecting rogue letters, avoiding all enemies and negative thoughts, collecting all red hearts and making it to the postbox within a time limit.

With the game itself being more basic than an Ikea coffee table, you really need some decent goals to get stuck into. Alas, they're not there.

The tilting control system doesn't work that well either. It's not easy to make sharp turns or stop your letter in its tracks, and that's annoying since the whole game involves either trying to collect things or avoid them.

Imagine trying to escape the ghosts in Pac-Man by tilting the maze and bouncing a semi gravity-less Pac-Man out of their way and you'll have an idea how badly this works.

That said, there's a difference between Forever Friends and Pac-Man, which is that the bad things in Forever Friends don't really chase you, unlike Pac-Man's ghosts. They just exist, bouncing blandly and blindly about, randomly placed and with no purpose.

And that pretty much sums up Forever Friends itself. You're going to have to really *heart* those bears to get anything out of this game.