Cooking up the ideal blend of ♒fun and edꦦucation is a dark alchemical art, and success is rare. Things like Brain Training work because the mental workout is delivered in short bursts. Also, math and verbal reasoning work well in a quickfire format. History is harder to condense into info fun nuggets, as Ruthless Romans proves.

Playing as a trainee gladiator𓂃, y🍃ou run around a cartoonized Rome (well, try to – the D-pad control is a nightmare) completing repetitive minigames to earn new ‘fighting skills’. The motion-controlled tests are the ‘game-iest’ bits, consisting largely of target tests. These can be played with up to three friends in a separate minigame mode.

But in an💫 attempt to shoehorn in some educational content, there are also quizzes. The answers can be picked up from books lying around the gam💯e world, but this seems to be a terribly stilted way of picking up interesting facts. The Latin graffiti on the walls is a nice touch – why couldn’t the historical facts have been presented like this rather than in those gameplay-ruining books?

Criminally, for a game about gladiators, there’s no remote-waving sword-fighting when you have a scrap in the Coliseum after completing t🐽he minigames – it’s all button-presses or tracing outlines. Surely the promise of lopping off some bloke’s head is a♏ better way to get the kids interested.