Putt Touch Golf

Putt Touch Golf aims to offer you the experience of doddering around a seaside mini-golf course and cursing when your ball ricochets off a tiny windmill. It challenges you to figure out how to get a hole-in-one by bouncing your golf ball off of a dozen angled walls. Like the majority of games in this genre, it's a top-down affair, and for your money you get a full 18-hole course.

There's so much wrong with this game that it's hard to know where to begin. Needless to say, there's a fair chance it'll actually make you angry when you realise that you could have instead bought a perfectly serviceable egg roll and a packet of crisps with your money.

Upon starting a new game things briefly appear promising - the course graphics are decent enough to energise your expectations. Like a siren seducing sailors with the lullaby of her voice, though, any allure that Putt Touch Golf may have is shattered by the cold reality of its gameplay.

The controls are simple enough: touch the ball with your finger and then slide it in the direction opposite the one in which you want the ball to move. This swings your virtual putter back to hit the ball. Unfortunately, there's often not enough room to putt inwards from an edge, forcing you to make weedy shots. As such, the controls - the core of any golfing game - are utterly broken, meaning you often have to play several weak shots to play away from an edge, because you can't scroll past them.

Bugs aplenty, such as the ball getting stuck and rattling back and forth in a demented fashion until we quit the game, add another layer of complication. Returning to a completed course causes the game to crash, which is of course an unacceptable malady.

These problems may have been forgivable if the game boasted the kind of design that encouraged progress, but it doesn't. There's scant imagination on display and because there are no limits on shots, you can see every one of the 18 holes on your very first go. On the plus side, this means you won't have missed anything and feel compelled to repeat the experience. (Note that if you're on your way to claiming the 'world's biggest masochist' trophy and decide to play again, there's a good chance the game will crash when you pick a level anyway. Still, at least that saves you going through the pain.)

With the power iPhone offers, it shouldn't be beyond the capabilities of a developer to create something snazzy. That this game can't even match the kind of mini-golf displayed in 1980s budget PC games shows that while technology moves ever onwards, we'll never entirely be free of dreadful cheapo games.