“Supermodel Empire” is obviously a product of a reality TV world, in particular one in which “Project Runway” and similar fashion and design competitions exist. For its setting it borrows heavily from the world of “Project Runway,” introducing you as the winner of a design competition and the new small-business-owner of your very own label. You challenge is to design amazing fashions and build both your bank account and your fame.

Okay, that’s out of the way, here’s what the game is really about. You play a mini game consisting of matching cards of like colors within a limited number of moves. You have a limited amount of time to play these games, and each game takes up a set portion of that time; what’s more, each card game takes up a different amount of time and offers a different number of turns, and costs a different amount of money, so you have to choose you games wisely to maximize your winning color match counts. This is important because for every card you remove through color matching, you reveal more of a “fashion” image, which you then compare to a long list of images in an attempt to reconstruct the final image before you run out of time.

It’s a complex set of game rules, but not difficult to learn or get used to. Oh, you can also “hire” employees who have a certain percent chance of bringing you extra benefits during your research phase, whether it’s from additional sections of the fashion image unveiled, or opportunities to make extra money or take on side projects. Those same employees can also desert you without warning, though, and “steal” your designs, which resets the hidden image so that nothing’s revealed. When your days are up, you present your fashion at a show and earn money based on how accurate it is.

You also have to take snapshots of it at just the right time when a viewfinder scrolls through your screen; the closer you are to perfect timing, the more money you make on the photos.

In part, this is all a long way of explaining that the game is more sophisticated than some players might think based solely on the title—it’s not for the Bratz crowd. The game developer have done a good job of keeping things mixed up, so that you progress from card matching to pattern revealing and matching to limited resource juggling (via the employee component) to timed button mashing.

For a game with so many complications to its mechanics, it plays surprisingly well. Menus are easy to navigate through, and the actual game play is quite easy once you get it down. There are two areas that pose a slight challenge. The first is learning how to play the card matching game. It’s simple, but not well explained, so it can take a few failed attempts to get it right. The second is the other mini-game, the photo snapshot—on my N95, as the viewfinder speeds up, the hardware button delay increases, so that I eventually learned to press the button several milliseconds before I would have needed to had I gone by vision alone.

Like just about every other phone game I’ve played, it ends too quickly and doesn’t have a lot of replayability.

The truth is, I can’t imagine many straight guys being interested in this game, but only because of the narrative structure around it—if it were repackaged as an alien research or science story, or a spy thriller (both concepts that would work equally well with the game mechanics), it would appeal to that group. I’m glad, though, that Digital Chocolate made a good game that’s actually not in those genres. The young straight male demographic has the rest of the marketplace by the balls too often, and their highly restricted appetite for a few select genres and character types make the whole game industry less imaginative than it could be.