Casual games divide a lot of people; you either love the fact that all these new, casually focused games such as Brain Training help widen the gaming community by introducing simple to play mechanics to a variety of people who previously would never have entertained the thought of playing videogames, or, like many seasoned gamers out there, you find the whole casual gaming phenomenon a real bore and you blame casual games for the decrease in the kind of high quality, innovative games that you grew up with. Metal Gear Solid or SingStar, Grand Theft Auto or Animal Crossing, Resident Evil or the next edition of Brain Training - what would you prefer to play? I know which games I'd choose, but casual gaming is a major force to be reckoned with and Rising Star Games are banking on this with their latest release.

Colour Cross is a puzzle game that seems primarily aimed at the casual market. The goal is simply to fill in squares with particular colours to reveal a hidden picture and, using a simple paint by numbers system, you need to decipher which colour should be applied to each square. The top screen details how many squares there are for a colour, per row or column; for example, if you have a five by five grid as your template then there are twenty-five squares to be filled in. You start with the first row of five squares and, after consulting the top screen, you learn that there are five blue squares in this row, which makes the whole process simple because filling in the row of five squares with the blue colour means that you have completed that particular row. You then move on to the first column and you check the top screen once again, which tells you that there are three blue squares and two red squares on this particular column. As you had previously filled in the first row with blue, the first square in the column is already blue, which means that the following two squares are blue because the top screen says there are three blue squares in this particular column. You fill the two squares in with blue, leaving the remaining two squares to be filled in with red. You select the red paint and fill in the last two squares of the column, leaving sixteen squares left in order to complete the puzzle. Of course, things get a lot more complicated as you progress through the different levels and the one hundred and fifty or so grids.

When you select a puzzle from the options menu you are brought to a grid that is filled with a certain number of squares and the grids increase in size as you progress, as well as altering in shape. The top screen gives an overview of the grid and also how many squares of a particular colour type there are. For instance, you might glance at the first row, which is eight squares long, and above it is a list of numbers in coloured boxes; a two in a brown box, a three in a white box and finally a two in a grey box, telling you clearly how many squares of each colour there are in the row. An icon resembling a tube of paint sites in the corner of the lower screen and you use the stylus to tap this, which squirts out a selection of colours. Tapping a particular colour results in the grid on the lower screen changing slightly; for example, selecting the grey colour generates a series of numbers around the grid on the lower screen - sometimes there will be just one value next to a row or column but often there is more than one number attributed to each. These numbers reflect the layout of grey squares within the row, so if there is a number five next to a row then that means that there are five grey squares next to each other. If there is a two and a three next to a row then that means that there are two grey squares next to each other and another set of three grey squares next to each other. If you select blue then the grid changes to show you the details of how the blue squares are laid out across the grid. At this stage you begin to realise how valuable the top screen is, because it gives a general overview of proceedings.

If you put a colour in the wrong square then you are given a time penalty that's added to your overall time for completing the puzzle, and the more you pick the wrong colour, the harsher the penalty becomes. You might think that the game is beginning to sound quite complicated by now but it's really very simple to play. Unfortunately, the amount of time consumed by the later puzzles and the lack of innovatively designed grids make Colour Cross a frustrating experience from start to finish. Upon completing of a grid you are shown how long it took you to finish, as well as any penalties that are added to your completion time. There are fifteen puzzles per theme and there are ten themes in all, ranging from Candy-based grids where all the shapes revolve around sweets to Horror where the grids reveal scary looking objects such as a skull. There is also a picture per theme that needs to be unravelled and successful completion of grids within a particular theme reveal more of the picture. You don't gain anything when you manage to reveal the entire picture though and it's definitely not worth the labour.

The controls work well; the stylus can be easily manipulated to populate the squares with colour whilst switching between colours is a very simple process, although there were occasions when I found myself accidentally moving the stylus across one box too many, resulting in a time penalty because I hadn't zoomed in far enough and you didn't realise that I was about to overreach. The larger girds require you to use the zoom mechanism and directional pad, which are easy to manipulate too.

There are some real problems when it comes to the colour palettes at your disposal, though; there is one puzzle that has a dark red, a brown, a purplish red and then another shade of brown and after twenty to thirty minutes of staring at the screen, trying to differentiate between the very similar colours, it just hurt my eyes. You can use the shoulder buttons to zoom in and out because some of the grids are huge - but it's more frustrating than fun when trying to remember what you just filled in. If you have several similarly shaded squares then it's nigh on impossible to see anything from a zoomed out viewpoint, so you end up zooming in a whole lot more than you should need to do. The music is terribly annoying all the way through, too; the soundtrack never changes no matter what grid or theme you find yourself trawling through and is a kind of fusion of Japanese pop and techno that grates from the moment you hear it.

There is no sign of a multiplayer mode either, so it's single player all the way, which is a major mistake, some enjoyment could have been gained by allowing at least a two-player mode. You could have battled someone else under a 'fastest one to finish' set up but unfortunately this hasn't been implemented in Colour Cross, dramatically reducing its lifespan. Your profile does keep a record of the quickest completed times but it's very unlikely that you'll want to go back and put yourself through the frustration again. Puzzle games are meant to be challenging and work the brain but at the same time you have to be able to enjoy the experience; this isn't the case with Colour Cross because it's a frustratingly simple premise that lacks so much in terms of graphics, sound and fun that it ends up being very forgettable.

There's nothing colourful about Colour Cross; it's a simple puzzle game akin to Picross or a painting version of Sudoku that hasn't been implemented very well. The lack of multiplayer mode is a significant omission while the technical attributes like graphics and sound are poorly implemented throughout. What could have been a challenging and innovative puzzle game has ended up as being more like an artist's worst nightmare.

Reviewed by Christopher McNally for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).