PrisonVille

PrisonVille is a game made almost exclusively for Daily Mail readers.

You know all those stories that talk of life behind bars being an easy ride in the 21st century? How it's all afternoons on the PlayStation and evenings spent in the sauna?

It appears that developer 24MAS has someone on the inside, reporting that all this, and more, is true.

Indeed, life inside PrisonVille is anything but punishing, whether you're one of the comic strip-style beefcakes who happen to have been incarcerated there or the guy pressing the buttons on his keypad to shuffle the inmates from cell to cell.

People-management is - in a very loose sense - the order of the day in PrisonVille.

At the start of each round, you're given a set of goals: whether it's ensuring every prisoner under your watch has a bath, uses the gym, or – bizarrely – manufactures an assortment of kids' toys.

Your role is to go from building to building, picking up each subject and prompting him to attend to the task at hand. When he's finished, a heart pops up above his head, signalling that it's either time to move him on to the next building or send him off to bed.

That's basically all there is to it.

Once a prisoner has been around long enough to pick up three hearts, he's released back out into the (significantly more taxing) world – a rather amusing approach early on, it has to be said, when simply working out and having a wash before bed is enough to seal the deal.

In fact, the only way it appears you can fail is if you leave prisoners hanging around for too long.

As the levels pass, so more are added to your books, and – in a particularly basic take on time-management – swapping those who've finished the job with those waiting in line is the most taxing part of play.

That's if you can really call what's been delivered here 'play' at all.

PrisonVille is undoubtedly one of the most pointless packages that's ever landed on our desks at Pocket Gamer, with a set of badly translated instructions and no-frills visuals topping off what is less a case of serving time and more a case of wasting it.