Hands on with Paparazzi Snapshot on mobile

Outside puzzle, there are almost no games where you don't have to kill somebody at some point or another. Even Sonic is a bloodbath, albeit one filled with the blood of monsters. It says a lot about our attitude to the press, then, that I-play's Paparazzi Snapshot has a greater air of scandal about it than Turok.

In fact, a desultory Google search for comments about it has just turned up the phrase "so far beyond sad and frightening that I really don't know what to say," on the first page of results.

Hysterical lunacy aside, Paparazzi Snapshot is a pretty harmless interactive I-spy game along the lines of the DS's I Spy Fun House. The PC version is a mainstay of casual game charts, with more than 700,000 downloads under its belt so far, and I-play is hoping to beat the competition to the punch on mobile.

You play in the role of a photo journalist, trying to advance your career by taking pictures of celebrities without their permission. Each screen is a clutter of stuff, and your reptilian editor is constantly on hand to tell you what to find and capture in your viewfinder before the timer runs down.

Fleshing out the main I-spy mechanic are variations Find the Difference and Snapshot, in which you have to track a moving subject.

There are four assignments and eight different locations to work through, as well as 15 awards to collect as you advance your reputation as a snoop. With things getting progressively more difficult as you reach the later levels, we're not expecting this to be a title you can rattle through on your first try, although the opening levels we've previewed were fairly straightforward.

It's a concept well-suited to the mobile, particularly since the controls are confined to simply scrolling up, down, left, right, and along the diagonals that haunt the spaces in between ('5' takes the shot).

Of course, in an I-spy game everything rests on the quality of the images. The objects you're looking for need to be clearly visible but knitted into its fabric, like camouflaged animals. From what we've seen so far, I-play has done a good job.

Click 'Track It!' to find out how good.