Touchgrind is a game with a bold aim: to be the world's first true multitouch skateboarding experience in the palm of your hand. Is it? Without a shadow of a doubt, controlling your miniature board is about as natural as you can get from a glass surface. You hold two fingers on the board to go forward, lift your first finger and then your back finger to ollie (jump for everyone else). By flicking your first finger you can flip the board, and by flicking your back finger you can rotate it. It's surprisingly intuitive, and takes practice, but you can pull off a good number of flip tricks and grinds once you master the timing (all depends on the speed of your finger swipe).

As your fingers take place of the legs on an actual board, there's no fancy grabs like the melon, stalefish or indy grab, or free styling moves such as caspers, primos, pogos or even manuals. Lip tricks are also absent. While we can understand that any trick that involves your hands is missing from the game, it'd be cool to darkslide along a rail, flip off into a nose manual and flip back out again. Because the game is viewed from a top down perspective, it is actually quite hard to see what is coming up next. To alleviate this, Illusion Labs created some object markers that fade into view whenever a trick object draws near. Put simply, it doesn't really work that well, and it's an exercise in patience to line up to a rail, let alone get the right angle for a funbox. You can also zoom out to view where you are, which is cool.

Once you've mastered the controls, you can skate in the large competition arena for points, and points mean prizes! Actually, they mean more board designs, 12 of them to be exact. Each of them claims to have it's own unique ability, but we didn't see much, if any, difference between them. We did like the graphics on them though. Anyway, in the competition mode, you'll be competing against the clock for big points. The best lines tended to involve tricking before grinding onto a rail and tricking off again. Landing a big trick successfully can increase your score multiplier so it's in your best interest not to bail for fear of losing your lead in points. And once you've nailed that trick, you can replay it - which is a great feature.

Presentation wise, Touchgrind feels like a proper game. The board and it's surroundings are rendered in full 3d, and you'll see a realistic animation of what you swiped with your fingers. Though there are 3 modes, there's only two parks, both of which share the same industrial look. How cool would it have been to have several parks with different obstacles and textures? There's no music, but the sound effects are absolutely top notch, if a little too clean. When matched with the right music, (sound effects work over the top of iPod music) they give the feel of a real skateboarding game. And the menu wheel that you spin is a cool touch, and equally well presented.

Touchgrind is difficult to rate. On the one hand, it has a superlative physics engine combined with seamless controls and realistic sound effects. On the other hand is it's narrow top down perspective, it's ultimately limiting trick roster and stingy couple of parks. Whilst it's extremely satisfying once you land a perfect trick, the game doesn't offer much else in the way of achievements or goals and is short lived as a result.

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