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• Decent variety of mini-games
• Very girly

• Won't appeal to Charm Boys
• Wii isn't exactly starving for mini-game compilations

Targeting girl gamers is a tough task. Make things too pretty-girly, and you'll get accused of cynical exploitation and stereotyping. Ignore the genuine desire of many little girls to dress up dolls in pretty clothes and aspire to be teenagers and you'll miss out on sales. EA's latest offering, Charm Girls Club: Pyjama Party firmly sits in the latter camp, as it's all about clothes, dress-ups, cake decorating and BFFs to a degree that those who recoil against such stuff will find a bit difficult to swallow. Little girls do tend to lap up this stuff by the truckload, however.

Like most Wii mini game compilations, Charm Girls Club: Pyjama Party works best with multiple players. Players can choose from eight pre-set Charm Girls, or create their own custom avatar, although annoyingly Mii avatars can't be imported. Then it's time to spin the party wheel, which randomly chooses first a Charm Girl party host, then the second from their set of games on offer. Once you've played a game once it can be deliberately selected from free play mode if you don't want to leave things to chance. The range of themes for games is pretty wide, from balloon popping to speed hair teasing to bed bouncing, but the controls are simple and fairly repetitive. The random nature of mini-game selection can be a bit annoying, as there's games that will appeal more to some players than others, and until you've unlocked the better games you could get stuck in a repeating loop of poorer games.

As always, we weren't going to trust our own adult viewpoint entirely when judging what's clearly a game aimed and marketed at young tweens, so we handed it and a bunch of Wiimotes over to some younger female gamers with an older Charm Girl to run affairs. Charm Girls Club: Pyjama Party delivered pretty much what it promised, as our younger players enjoyed the dressing up and simple mini-game action on offer. Whether EA's really managed to create an entirely new IP that'll resolve out into doll lines and animated features is anybody's guess, as the core Charm Girls whose games you play are really pretty generic, and that same generic style applies to the mini-games on offer. While there's thirty mini-games in name, many of them share exactly the same game mechanics, whether it's wiimote waggling or pointing at the right onscreen objects. If you threw a dart at a retail shelf of Wii games anywhere, the odds are very high that you'd hit a compilation of mini-games, or a game that included mini-games as an add-on option. As such, the lack of real innovation in Charm Girls Club: Pyjama Party's games does reduce its appeal a little, as you could buy similar or even better games for the same price.

From a parental level, there's something rather twee and cloying about the Charm Girls experience that's a bit tough to shake off, but personal preferences and tastes may vary. Certainly, if your family includes a few Charm Boys as well as Girls, this probably isn't the mini-game compilation that'll bring the whole family together around the Wii in the way that, say, Wii Sports has done for a number of years now. At the same time, if your in-house Charm Boys already have enough blasting and Ben 10-centric action to choke a dinosaur and you're looking for something to play with your little princess, Charm Girls Club: Pyjama Party should suit nicely.

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