If ever there was a cash cow that could be milked to within an inch of its life, Disney's smash teen hit “High School Musical” has to be it. Not only has there been a follow-up movie (on which this game is based) but there have been CDs, posters, every conceivable type of merchandising and computer games.

Now invading the Nintendo DS as a sequel to High School Musical: Makin' The Cut, Work This Out! takes you to the supposedly idyllic and exclusive Lava Springs country club where you can play as six of the principal characters from the film (Troy, Gabriella, Ryan, Sharpay, Chad and Taylor). The aim is to complete a series of tasks in the run-up to competing in the Star Dazzle talent show.

The bottom screen displays the layout of the resort and the top screen is the close-up camera on your character performing a series of minigames. Each job is posted on a board in the lobby and is against the clock. Built around the beat of the music track, two involve dragging golf balls into a collection machine and basketballs into a net and the remaining two revolve around opening umbrellas for sunbathers and adding ingredients to sandwiches.

In addition, there's a number of fetching tasks which enable you to explore the (limited) grounds and interior of the building, and an ongoing Lost Music challenge where pieces of scattered sheet music have to be collected by performing a short dance routine and tapping icons with the stylus in time with the beat; a bit like using a dance mat on the PS2.

Once you've performed your chores and recaptured three of the lost pieces of music, you can then take to the stage to perform that day's hit tune from the film. Every track you ‘unlock' then goes into the Jukebox menu so you can listen to it whenever you like. Each day there are also 30 CDs hidden round the map that you can collect and there's a multiplayer option that allows one other player to go head-to-head on the basketball, sandwich and umbrella games.

This might sound like fun for fans of the movies, but it's hard to find anything to enjoy here. The minigames are simplistic in the extreme, too similar and repetitive and none of it bears any relationship to the movie. The graphics are at best basic but the worst feature is, of all things, the music.

Disney makes much of the fact that all 10 songs from the film can be played on the DS with the game off and the lid down, but that only applies to the songs you've unlocked during gameplay. So until late in the game you only have a few songs to listen to, which then repeat themselves endlessly in the background until you start to go stir crazy.

Even the most ardent fans will be reaching to flick the volume off long before the end. Let's hope “High School Musical 3” is a silent movie...

Unfortunately this is a typical example of how to use a successful movie franchise to produce a cheap, ill-thought-out and unimaginative game that will do its damnedest to put you off the songs at its heart.