When I first looked at the cover of PictoImage I only had one thought “Oh, good it will be like those imagine games”, but I was wrong well… to a point at least. The idea of the game is that you basically play a game of electronic Pictionary using the DS’s touch screen to draw out and subsequently guess at the picture drawn too.

For the drawing of the picture you use the touch screen like a canvas, drawing out your picture on a small 4 by 6 rectangle. Then to answer it you can either use the same handwriting recognition technology that allows the brain training games to work when writing the answer or you can choose to a normal QWERTY keyboard interface.

The single player is the worst part of the game and clearly not what the game was designed for, it feels a bit like an added extra which is very strange thing to say as if anything it’s normally the multiplayer that is tacked on. The basis of the single player is that you go up against supposed real-life people of different ages but in reality the majority of people you meet are probably sub ten years old.

There is one saving grace for the single player mode and that is the tutorials, these offer up some great ways to progress in the multiplayer scene. Instructing you on how to draw and how to make sure that your handwritten answers are readable by the system. There is also a step-by-step on how to draw some objects, like a bee or a mobile phone, to allow you to get a feel for the drawing element. It really won’t make you the next world premiere artist but it will allow you to beat your mates fair and square.

Where the real fun is to be had is the multiplayer games, which can be played with up to eight people. There are various game modes including a mode where one player starts off the game and draws an image before passing the DS on to the next person, who must draw their own version of this image, this then carries on until the last person’s turn who must then guess what the first image was originally . But by far the most classic mode is the one in which a player is given a word and has to draw it out while the other players guess what that word is, this is part of the game is great fun and works really well with four players.

The set-up of PictoImage works well and is really fun to play with others, but unfortunately only with others. The single player can get extremely annoying as at times there is no way to tell what some of the computer generated people have drawn without guessing for what almost seems like a lifetime, and even then it is usually something that looks like what is on the page.