Blind World is a superbly presented puzzle game that has you painting colour onto a blank canvas by tilting and swiping your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. This universal app comes with 40 different stages and two themes; initially you’ll paint rainbows but the second set is monochrome.

You don’t just paint onto the level, but instead by navigating around you’ll paint objects as you encounter one or more of their edges. Eventually once you’ve worked your way around you’ll have an outline of the area and the obstacles within; many of the levels contain obstacles that are affected by the gravitational pull dictated by the accelerometer.

You can pinch the screen to get a better view of the level which helps especially when they start to get bigger, and by swiping with your finger you can rotate the maze. Problem is, doing this can result in an unexpected crash; because Blind World doesn’t save your progress between levels a crash could mean that you have to restart the entire game. The bug is not easily reproducible, but in our testing both iPad and iPhone 3GS experienced multiple crashes; this was a major bugbear.

Another headache is the combo system found in the game. Basically, you are scored points for each paint splat that you land successfully, and score extra for successfully completing a combo. Annoyingly, combos are broken easily even if you’re off one of the edges for less than a second and furthermore if you don’t reach the goal score you will have to reset the level. So for some levels to keep your combo going you must travel slowly as simply painting the level 100% is not enough. Why is this? It should be like Zen Bound; offer different completion percentages and not frustrate your users by forcing arbitrary goals like scoring a big combo. Furthermore, if you want to revisit a level, your progress is wiped.

It’s stupid things like this that mean the difference between a good grade and a bad one. Blind World is conceptually sound and would be a steal at 59p if it weren’t for these fundamental flaws. What a waste.

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