JoJo's Fashion Show 2

The world of the fashionista is surely littered with glitz and glamour, with a side order of male and female twinkies walking around in next to nothing thrown in for good measure.

Be still your beating heart, then, when you come to take on JoJo's Fashion Show 2. Surely, for entertainment purposes if nothing else, those behind this supposed fashion designer simulator will have cherry picked the most alluring parts of the job for gamers to play around with?

JoJo's Fashion Show 2 certainly has half naked models in their dozens – at least, before you dress them, that is – but that's about the only element worth getting hot under the collar about. For the most part, what's on offer here is painfully routine.

In truth, criticising a mobile release for failing to simulate the hustle bustle of the fashion world is, perhaps, a little unfair.

What is slightly bizarre about JoJo's Fashion Show 2, however, is its allegiance to conformity. Rather than encouraging you to be creative or take risks, success here relies on your ability to memorise the game's set style guide and apply it to the letter.

The bulk of play focuses on you dressing sets of models in a number of rigid styles displayed above their heads – Bollywood, conservative, or even seasonal collections thrown at you in succession.

Below their feet is a collection of various garments, the challenge being to best match up the somewhat limited selection of clothes with each model's desired look.

Each style comes with a set number of pointers pushed upon you before the start of each level, with every model you send out on the catwalk later rated in terms of your ability to pick out the clothes that best fit.

Best fit the style in question, that is, rather than matching with each other.

Indeed, many of the combinations look simply awful on the screen, but earn you points aplenty simply because the game perceives a certain length of skirt as typically conventional or a particularly garish top as provocative.

As such, success comes from a combination of your ability to learn just how JoJo's Fashion Show 2 perceives each item of clothing and the speed at which you can employ said knowledge.

It's not an especially fun approach, but it's at least consistent.

While, in theory, it's a setup that should work – the game wisely imploring you to study the colour, cut and characteristics of each item – it soon becomes tired, with the same items popping up time after time and the whole rhythm of play following an especially repetitive beat.

Stripped to its bare bones, there's nothing essentially wrong with the idea of matching up items to order, but the context of placing it in the world of the fashion designer appears particularly slack after extended play.

It just doesn't lend itself to such a rigid approach and, as a result, Jojo's Fashion Show 2 is far too routine to really steal the show.