If you're a certain age you may have played Hangman using pen and paper in years gone by, and now the classic word-guessing game has gone digital to entice a whole new generation of fans. We've been giving it a go on the Nokia C5-03, and you can check out our thoughts after the jump.

If you're not familiar with Hangman, the objective is to guess a word or phrase by identifying the letters it's made up of. Guess a letter correctly and you'll see where in the spelling of the mystery word it is to be found; with each letter you pick that isn't in the word, however, a fresh piece is added to your very own gallows until the structure is built and your game is over.

Check out our Nokia C5-03 Review Roundup

It's a simple concept, but one that's been a favourite for years, typically serving as a great way to while away a long journey in the car, or use up a few spare minutes with a friend. The game has survived its migration to the mobile world well – though it would be quite difficult to get the concept wrong – and Hangman the app succeeds in its remit to provide some harmless (despite the grisly concept behind the game) fun for the mobile user. You can choose from a select number of themes, such as European place names, or old movie titles, and the game suits the Nokia C5-03's touch interface, as guessing a letter is a simple matter of tapping it on the screen.

There are a couple of downsides, though. Presumably in an attempt to give the game some kind of linear progression, you unlock “achievements” after a certain number of successful games, but they don't actually change the gameplay in any way, they're simply digital baubles stuck away in your online trophy cabinet. But the biggest flaw of all, and one we can't blame Hangman the app for at all, is that it's the human interaction between two people that makes the game so enjoyable. With the old pencil and paper variant, you got to play both sides of the game, and the fun came from trying to come up with a word the other person wouldn't guess, or second-guessing what sort of word they would go for.

A multiplayer Bluetooth mode would have gone some way to achieving the same feeling, but without it Hangman ends up feeling a bit sterile.