The sheer wealth of games with the word 'Tycoon' in the title often can blind you to the point where a half-decent one sneaks in and is easily missed. Because if you can forgive the rampant Americanisms, School Tycoon - a budget reissuing of a title that few (this writer included) can ever remember getting a full price release - is surprisingly engaging.

The idea, and you can approach it as an open game or through a series of challenges, is to build or inherit a High School and run it. This is an American High School, replete with baseball fields, half-pipes, amusement arcades and Jamie Oliver-inciting pizzerias, but that's not a major problem as far as the game is concerned.

Your success is measured across five gauges, with scores for academics, morale, athletics and so on. You service these through investment in buildings and staff, with a wide assortment of academic and administrative variants of either to invest in. The more buildings you buy, the more you unlock, the more students your school can attract and the more cash thus comes into the bank.

As with most half-decent Tycoon games, School Tycoon is all about balance. It's okay, for instance, blowing your seed money on a large number of impressive buildings, but if you can't back that up with the maintenance staff to keep them operative, then chances are they'll eventually burn down. Likewise, those maintenance staff come in mighty useful when one of the annoyingly frequent natural disasters hits town.

As is usual in the genre - and it's fair to say that School Tycoon fairly rigidly conforms to the template - you can click on any of the staff or students who inhabit your school and they're quick to tell you what they think. If they're bored, don't have anywhere to go to the loo, are hungry or whatever, they'll simply leave, and seeing as you get cash each day based on their attendance, it's worth making sure that doesn't happen.

All of which, thanks to an accessible, tried and tested interface, makes for engaging entertainment. In many ways, to be fair, it's a risk-free template, but the notion of setting up a successful academic institution proves to be a better basis for a game than you'd perhaps expect.

On the downside, when we sat through a second tornado in under a month it raised eyebrows, and the sheer lack of anything in the way of new ideas is worth knocking a few marks off. Those Americanisms have their moments, too.

But considering this is an impulse-buy £4.99 special, School Tycoon is well worth the money. And with a price that low, the game's cracks are quickly papered over.

A fun, accessible and quite challenging tycoon game, at a steal of price. A pleasant surprise.