Doodle Sky Pro

The art of doodling is fast overtaking slavering zombies as the primary focus of portable gaming.

It’s enough to make you wish you’d kept all of your crude childhood scrawlings for the express purpose of putting them in a video game and making untold millions.

The team behind Doodle Sky Pro clearly believes that tacking on even the most superficial of gaming concepts to a world full of scribblings is enough to ensure success. While it looks the part, with cute planes and surprisingly detailed backgrounds, there's very little meat on the bone, and what meat there is is distinctly unpalatable.

The biggest issue is the control system - it's flat out unresponsive.

Unlike Flight Control – which is a massive influence – drawing the intended path of your plane doesn’t result in an entirely accurate manoeuvre. Instead of following your fingertip exactly, the game charts a rough approximation, taking into account the wide turning arc of your craft.

It’s actually a more realistic way of representing the movement of an aircraft, but it results in a confusing, often awkward game. Getting your plane to go exactly where you want it to is a struggle.

This lack of precision is made even more infuriating by the fact that flying is only half of the picture – you’re also in combat with other planes.

Your aircraft's machine gun automatically fires whenever you’re in range of a foe. Additionally, you can launch missiles at by tapping the a symbol that flashes atop your plane when you're within striking distance.

When you’re duelling against solitary adversaries it’s easy enough to get behind your opponent to avoid taking damage, but multiple attackers are a different story. Occasional help from computer-controlled wingmen evens up the odds a little, yet for most of the game's more than 40 missions you’re on your own. Whether or not you survive each mission feels more a question of luck than skill.

All of this is compounded by the fact that the screen doesn’t automatically scroll to keep up with the action. Instead you have to physically move around by placing your finger on the screen and sliding it around. It’s far too easy to mistakenly tap your plane and send it on an unintended new course, leading to more frustrating deaths.

Add in a spectacularly poor English localisation and no mission variety and you’ve got a title which struggles to hold your attention for even a few minutes. OpenFeint support is the one glimmer of hope in an otherwise murky picture, but even that is poorly implemented. The decision not to offer achievements is a curious one.

Ultimately, the misguided interface undoes the good work achieved by the attractive visuals and sends Doodle Sky Pro plummeting earthwards.