A quick bit of history. Kudos was a game from Positech Games, or more to the point, from the brain of Cliff Harris. It was a fascinating, if slightly flawed, pseudo-strategy version of The Sims, where your aim was to go through life and try to be happy in whatever you do. It's a swine to effectively explain, but it worked.

Kudos Rock Legend, the sequel of sorts, applies the same game mechanics but focuses them heavily on building a music career, and that happens to be a minor stroke of genius. All of a sudden there's far more of a point to things and, thanks to some clever additions, you'll quickly find it's a game that can take over your life, at least in the short term.

The idea is this: you must recruit and build a band, then build them up to fame and fortune. And you do this in various ways.

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Firstly, you hold auditions and get people in. As your collected dole money builds up, you'll be able, at first, to hire out the local boozer for a gig or two. But here's the thing: the game lets you do one action a day, and from time to time you need to rest, or else you all get too stressed or tired. So in the build up to a gig, do you go fly postering to get people interested, or rehearse in a pokey garage for a day? As the game progresses, the choices effectively remain the same, even if the circumstances change: the rehearsal room is swapped for the garage - with an appropriate charge - and a magazine interview replaces the fly postering.

Gigs are a great way to build up your cash reserves - assuming your band members aren't too stressed or demotivated, when they simply won't turn up, leaving you out of pocket - but they're only part of the jigsaw. There's also musical skill, and every now and then it's worth taking the band aside for music practice.

This takes the form of a little game of Simon, whereby you repeat a number sequence with the keyboard. It's actually, for our money, the weakest part of the game, putting a puzzle element into the midst of a strategy game. But it's harmless enough. Naturally, if you don't build up your musical skills then your gigs won't be great, although you can cover that up with other factors if you so choose.

Next there's song-writing. Unless you happen to write a classic song, your catalogue of tracks will need regularly refreshing, not least because your band gets sick of playing the same old hits. So you need to write some more. To do that, it helps if your inspiration level is high, and this can be boosted by buying and listening to other CDs and attending gigs.

These sometimes unlock influences, in the form of a series of notes. And these are vital for the song-writing screen. Here, you must fit notes together with, for maximum effect, the colour of the note at the end of each bar matching that at the start of the next. The more influences you have, the more notes you unlock to be able to use in your composition, which is ultimately rated out of 100.

It's simple and clever and works very well.

Rounding things off, you'll also need to go shopping, for merchandise to sell to the fans, for new instruments and incentives for your band, and for staff, stage props, effects and suchlike.

For the first two to three hours, we were utterly gripped by Kudos Rock Legend. Well presented, well explained and really good fun to play, building up your band is really good fun.

The problem only really comes once you've got them to fame, as the game runs out of things for you to do. It would have been great, for instance, if there was an element of the game to track the sales of your music in the charts, or the ability to go on a world tour. As it is, CDs will bring in the money, but they feel like an irrelevance, and once you've unlocked the top venues and bought all the stuff in the game's shop, you've pretty much topped out.

Still, it's terrific fun while it lasts and, given the modest asking price, you get good value for money out of the game. And if you haven't already, it should give you ample excuse to check out the Positech Games back catalogue. There are ideas and games in there you simply couldn't find on the shelves of Gamestation...

It might ultimately be limited, but Kudos Rock Legend is great fun while it lasts, and £13 well spent.