The great thing about the iPhone is that you can purchase and download an application almost instantly. If you don't like it, you can remove it and grab another one. And that's the predicament we find ourselves in with Expando - it's good in theory, but wears too thin in practice. In addition, it's glitchy and far too shallow for repeated plays, making it one to avoid.

The idea behind the game is that you must fill up a certain percentage of the screen with smiley faces whilst avoiding the red dots. Disturb one of these and you'll lose both the face and a life. Touching the screen creates a new one, and the longer you hold down, the bigger it gets. Obviously, you should be aiming to create the largest ones that you can, because you only get a certain quota of expanding faces per level. Furthermore, you can use the accelerometer to shunt and trap the red dots so that they don't interfere with your expanding emoticon empire. Except you can interfere. The game allows gravity, so you can literally push off both good smilies and red dots. They must be warped into a black hole somewhere, because once you do that, they disappear for good. You can literally spawn one or two emoticons and then use them to sweep the screen clear of challenge.

It probably doesn't help when your fingers get in the way all of the time, either. On more difficult levels with more red dots, you'll need finer precision which you just can't get with your fingers. The game concept just doesn't gel with the iPhone's input mechanisms - it's much better suited to mouse control. Unfortunately, you can't plug in a mouse, and so the experience is short lived.

To try and save this, Expando is packaged with a number of different modes - most of which are self explanatory - but appear almost identical to each other. Timed mode could have been dropped and a timer integrated into the main game, fast mode is pointless, and zero gravity takes the whole fun out of using the accelerometer to bully the red dots into submission. Furthermore, the backgrounds appear identical, which gives us the impression that the developer changed a couple of lines of code somewhere and called it a new mode. That's not kosher.

Instead of fixing the game's obvious flaws, HappyAppy seem to let you be content with assorted, generic backgrounds and trite audio loops which don't add much to this thoroughly broken experience. The presentation is seriously lacklustre - the menu screen is as good as it gets. We don't think you need this game, so save your £1.19 for something else.

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