Kung Fu Master Class

Who can deny the appeal of a game that begins with the immortal words, 'let your mind forget your weight. Leap forward and spring on the air particles'. It's not exactly Mark Twain admittedly, but it's pretty close.

This abstract wisdom however is about as good as Kung Fu Master Class gets. This game is just a bit bizarre and filled with defects and downfalls.

It's also barely a game for about half of it - unless you consider pressing the corresponding number on your keypad when it appears on the screen for the rest of infinity to be a game. I don't, because if it was, surely putting someone's number in your phone would also be a game.

Kung Fu Master Class consists of six games in total, all of which are unlocked from the start. The fact that everything is available immediately is both a positive and a negative point.

On the negative side it means there are no unlockables as rewards for doing well - your sole incentive is to beat your own high scores on a table.

On the plus side, it means you don't get stuck playing some of the more terrible games. You can just move onto the next whenever you like. Just don't expect the next one to be that much better...

To give examples of the quality of the games, the first one gives you a looping animation of your kung fu fighter leaping across rooftops and pops different numbers and directional arrows up on the screen one after another.

If you press the right one quickly enough, a bar on the screen fills up. Every time it fills to the top, you level up, and your score gets higher the longer you keep going too. If you press the wrong one, or if your bar depletes entirely, you fall off the roof and die.

Your only goal is to keep going indefinitely to get a high score. However, it's not that simple since - on the handset we reviewed the game on at least - the numbers that pop up are eye-squintingly difficult to make out.

It's also not that compelling since little fanfare is made of levelling up (you're not told which level you've actually reached) or of your score, which is shown in tiny digits in the corner of the screen.

It's basically very bland. The other games all have different themes, but are essentially similar. So the next one has you tapping left and right in order to balance your character on his head, and '5' to dodge occasional forks of lightning.

Again, the longer you maintain balance, the higher your score. But it's tough to actually care that much when there's no reward.

There's a couple of lame boss fights - one of which has you deflecting fireballs back at a sideways moving enemy on the opposite side of the screen - and their inclusion indicates this was a game initially designed with some sort of structure in mind, before someone decided to just bung all the elements together into a score-based series of mini-games.

If that's the case, it explains the lack of goals and structure to the game. But it hasn't worked to make it any better.

Kung Fu Master Class is playable enough for the twenty minutes it takes to explore all of the games. You could have some fun against another player trying to beat one another's scores, but that's a generous scenario.

Sitting on your own playing this is a fairly nondescript experience and it's very unlikely you'll find enough in any of these games to keep you rooted to them for long.