Sprung The Dating Game review

It's obvious from the blurb on the box that Sprung hasn't been designed with your typical gamer in mind. Certainly the concept, which is to "flirt your way through more than 50 dating missions," isn't one that DS devotees will find particularly alluring.

But if a 'reality dating comedy' can encourage some fresh fingers and thumbs to join the playing party then surely it has to be a good thing.

Well, it would be if Sprung weren't the most vacuous, air-headed excuse for a game that we've ever had the misfortune to suffer. Such a putrid advert for our beloved pastime is hardly likely to persuade non-believers that gaming is good.

Players are required to perform just one task over and over and over and, unless choosing correct combinations of conversational responses is your idea of fun, you'll find Sprung as engaging as a lobotomy.

It wouldn't be so bad if there were some logic behind it but choosing the right thing to say seems purely arbitrary. You quickly realise that the game's sole challenge is, in fact, just a tiresome and completely brainless process of elimination.

Having to play through a scene several times before eventually hitting on the correct sequence of responses is made all-the-more torturous thanks to dialogue which is absolute piffle and an utterly repugnant cast of characters who are a banal blend of stereotypical Hollywood teen movie types.

Given Sprung's creative vacuum, it's no surprise that the touch-screen is practically redundant, used simply to scroll through and select conversation choices. But even this was ditzy and we soon found it was too easy to accidentally select the wrong choice, so we switched to using the D-pad and face buttons instead.

While we weren't expecting much from this romantic dating comedy, it didn't take long to realise that it was even more insipid than it sounded on paper. This is gaming at its most superficial and deserves to be sprung, drawn and quartered.

Sprung will be released on 11 March for DS