Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures

£3.99 buys you full access for a month, and there are incremental packages all the way up to £44.99 for lifetime access for as long as the game is active. It's a sensible pricing structure, predictably nudging you towards the top tier but making it good enough value that parents accustomed to paying for full disc-based games won't be horrified.

When you take the plunge and upgrade, the game treats it with the sort of celebration you'd expect for completing most games. Fanfares soar as your favourite characters appear, beaming with pride. You've just made an online payment, but the game throws open its arms and welcomes you to the fold as if you just battled your way across the wastes of Tatooine to reach the sanctuary of full membership.

Once you're snuggled in the brown hessian bosom of the Jedi Order, you could carry on playing the full mini-games and earning Republic Credits, but on the galactic exchange rate, that's like getting paid in lira. Republic Credits are good for buying a couple of things, but if you really want to start personalising your Clone Wars adventure, you'll need to start topping up your Station Cash. After all, why does anyone become a Jedi, if not to buy chairs and hats?

It's here that the payments start to add up. 500 SC costs £4.00 in real money, while £74 is enough to make you the Alan Sugar of the Old Republic with 10,000 SC. Not that such riches will last long if you want to customise things.

New rooms for your living quarters, such as a disco, hangar or droid destruction chamber, are 500 SC a pop. New costume items range from 50 SC to 200 SC, but are cunningly compiled into matching sets. How many kids will just want to wear a bounty hunter's trousers?

You can even buy droids who will follow you around the lobby areas. A miniature pet AT-AT sets you back 300 SC, but R2-D2 can be purchased using 4000 Republic Credits, one of the few truly desirable items that can be bought using points earned through gameplay. Droids can also be customised with add-ons, although it's here that the limitations of the game's marketplace start to show. It's 150 SC to add "spinners" to your AT-AT. What are spinners? You won't know. The game tells you nothing about what you're buying, and clicking on the item without the required credits just takes you to the top-up screen. Are you ready to gamble a couple of real-world pounds on a "bipedal datacard", sight unseen?

Perhaps most annoying is what happens if you choose to pay for your membership using Station Cash rather than a direct credit card payment. It's £3.99 for one month, remember, but that same month costs 599 Station Cash. That's £4.79, according to my rudimentary sums, but as SC can only be purchased in block of 500, you have to buy 1000 SC for £8 in order to pay over the odds to play the game for one month. This sort of penny-pinching is the sort of thing that will make parents wary, especially as the requests for more virtual money start rolling in.

It all adds up very quickly, and with no real benefit. It certainly doesn't help that this social game doesn't seem to be very social. The lobby is full of characters, but most are standing still as their players are off in some mini-game or other. HUD icons give you access to pretty much everything, so there's never any reason to actually traverse the game world and meet other players, hence no reason to explore or chat. After ten minutes of fruitlessly introducing myself to eerie player statues, I finally got a greeting from one other player, but the communal World Chat channel is a sparse and lonely place.

It's a shame, since the game includes some nifty social features. A Facebook-style news feed updates friends as to what you're playing and how well you're doing, while personality quizzes add info to your profile about what colour lightsaber suits you best, or what sort of star cruiser you'd want to pilot.

Hopefully the community will build and become more sociable over time, but until that happens Clone Wars Adventures is a nice website full of decent mini-games with a less than rewarding membership scheme.