Slice it!

Hopping happily onto iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad with nary a care in the world, the child-like Slice It! comes across as something that could be described in a Saturday morning advertisement as "fun for the whole family!"

The first thing to realise before you plonk down the cash and pass little Jimmy a handset is that Slice It! is guaranteed to cause swearing - long bouts of gratuitous, puzzled, anguished swearing.

It may look like a toy, but you’d have to be a genius not to get stuck at some point while playing this clever, challenging game.

The concept is straightforward: draw lines with a magic crayon through various shapes in order to cut them into smaller shapes. Each level requires a certain number of crayons to be used and pieces to be sliced. The closer the shapes are in size at the end of all this, the better your score.

It starts off easy, with simple objectives like slicing a square in two. "Perfect!" the cheery American girl shouts after you cleave the square, the plinky-plonky piano playing its happy tune. It all feels a bit like you’re taking part in a short animated cutaway in "Sesame Street."

Then suddenly the game darkens. "Cut this unequal polygon into twelve parts using seven crayons exactly without passing through the two edges of the shape that would have otherwise make this task less impossible" it growls, before slamming the music box lid closed and scraping "FAILED" across the screen in chalk.

Along with the impassable lines, crazy shapes, and mirrors that reflect your cuts, the difficulty is confounded by every shape being ever-so-slightly off the grid. This makes perfect slicing - even when you know the cuts to make - incredibly hard.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Slice It! passes out hints whenever you earn a five-star rating on a puzzle, letting you use them on a later level. They don’t reveal all the cuts needed – it’s often where to make the first and second slices – but by the time you reach level 50 you’ll take all the help you can get.

This is especially true on iPhone and iPod touch, where making exact cuts with the tiny gridlines is extremely tricky. iPad is preferable if you're fortunate enough to have a choice.

In any case, if you don’t fancy your mind being slowly melted by a well-presented puzzler, you’re best keeping everyone in the family the hell away from Slice It!.