iCanSketchIt

It's actually quite refreshing to see a game that challenges your powers of observation and creation without also claiming to increase your IQ to that of a Vulcan science officer. Most every other game in iCanSketchIt's league promotes its classroom-style gameplay with an often ill-advised educational quotient. No one likes educational games - learning is for squares.

But that doesn't mean that mental, or in this case artistic, challenges are unwelcome. The developer's challenge is to take a math quiz or word puzzle and disguise it as a fun and frivolous video game - not give us homework to do. In that respect, iCanSketchIt puts itself forward as a simple and casual game; not an educational companion, which is definitely a bonus.

iCanSketchIt presents a shape, symbol, or basic picture featuring a combination of nine colours for you to memorise. Pressing the 'start level' button then takes you to a blank canvas where your task is to recreate the picture using your finger as a brush. These begin very simply, with a big grey circle, but progress to shamrocks and crude landscapes.

The 'brush size' can be altered to draw finer details or to colour in the larger areas more efficiently. The response of the touch screen is naturally superb, and there's a genuine sensation of daubing paint onto your iPhone. The real problem is also with this input method, however; it's obviously very restrictive and handicaps the would-be digital artist.

There's a compulsion to tilt the device to the side so you can see what you're painting, which introduces discrepancies in the shapes. Obviously, this doesn't help when it comes to racking up accuracy scores.

The game consists of two modes of play, Precision and Timed. Both draw from the same set of pictures, differing only in how you score. Precision uses a surprisingly accurate comparison method to determine how similar your rendition is to the original picture (to two decimal places, no less). Timed demands you render your copies as quickly as possible. The levels are the same, so you're naturally drawn to apply as much precision and alacrity regardless of the game mode.

The developer, Andrew Borland, has plans to allow sharing of unique drawings among users, which should expand the concept quite considerably if it catches on. So really, this isn't so much a complete game as a platform for people to add their own unique levels when the service becomes available; but weighing in at just over a quid, there's no hard feelings when you've worked through the available levels quite quickly.