The DS should be the perfect console for a pinball game; a quick pick up and play blast of ping-ping high score throwaway fun should work wonderfully on Nintendo's handheld machine. Lights should flash, sound effects should jangle, flippers should, er, flip and twenty idle minutes should be joyfully wasted. It seems so simple when you look at it like that, to the point that it's almost impossible to imagine someone doing it badly. I mean, how could you mess up a premise as simple as flashing lights and pinging balls? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Powershot Pinball Constructor, or, as I like to call it, How Not to Make a Pinball Game.

I booted the game up with high hopes; not only could I play pinball, but I could create my own tables, share them with my friends and finally become the pinball wizard I've always dreamed of being! These hopes and dreams were crushed on the menu screen and by the time I actually got to play the game I was clinging onto the will to live by only the slenderest thread. Navigating your way through the iPhone-inspired 'swooshy' menus takes what can only be described as an inhuman amount of patience. Slide your stylus around to spin a collection of icons until you reach the one you want, then tap it to select it. Simple enough in theory, but in practice it's unresponsive, clunky and infuriating. More often than not you'll end up selecting the wrong thing and when, by chance, you stumble upon the correct icon, you'll be jabbing at the screen for far too long before the game realises that you're trying to select it. To add insult to injury, there's no way to bypass this system - no way to use the d-pad for what it's actually here for. By this point I was swearing like a sailor who'd just stubbed his toe on a rusty anchor.

After finally managing to work my way into the single player menu, I was greeted with three options: Score, which is playing pinball, Time Attack, which is playing pinball with a time limit, and Stylus, where instead of using the shoulder buttons to control your flippers, you use the stylus. I selected Score - after a lot of tapping. This took me to the table selection screen, which, to my horror, contained only one unlocked table. ONE! That's like buying Street Fighter and only being able to play as Birdie. No one wants to do that. Pinball is all about the tables; the only reason I ever strayed from the videogame machines in my local arcade when I was younger was because of the flashing lights and manic sounds of some new pinball table that the owner had acquired. I didn't want to play because it was pinball; I wanted to play because the table looked cool. They always had a theme, some central point that the whole set up was based around, be it a film, a TV show, a sport or a giant spaceship from the future, and it was that which kept the ten pence pieces moving from my pocket to the money slot. As far as I can tell, the theme for the sole table available at the start of Powershot Pinball Constructor is the colour blue. Which, let's be honest, isn't that awe-inspiring. Unlocking the further two tables involves finding bonus games and secret areas in the first, so essentially you have to play the only available table to death until you finally manage to unlock another one. Even if the pinball itself was world-shatteringly brilliant, limiting the player to just one table for so long is effectively suicidal.

As you might have guessed by now, the pinball on offer here isn't of a high standard. In fact, it's painfully dull, with a learning curve that's little more than trial and error and a physics engine that would have felt outdated a decade ago. More than once my ball disappeared off the screen never to be seen again, leaving me forlornly waggling my flippers [Conjures up a picture of Ecco in distress! Ed], vainly trying to dislodge it from wherever it was stuck. The three different tables offer virtually no variation, just slightly different backgrounds, bonus games and secret areas to contend with. Getting your name on the high score table feels more like work than it does fun, and once it's there you feel no sense of achievement - you're just left wondering why you bothered. The sound effects grate after about four minutes and the music is some of the worst I've heard on a handheld for a very long time. There's nothing here to excite - nothing that grabs even the slightest bit of attention or interest. It's like one of those laptop pinball machines you can buy from dodgy markets, the ones that take two AA batteries and have plastic balls. There's no ding, no shine, just an odd smell and a poorly designed game that's destined to end up thrown in the attic and forgotten about forever. There are multiplayer modes, but I doubt you'll be able to find anyone else with a copy of the game to play with, and as for the single DS swap over games, be my guest - just be ready for anyone you inflict this game upon to stop being your friend shortly afterwards.

"But wait!" I hear you cry, "What about the Constructor part of the title? Isn't this finally the game that allows us to build the pinball table we've always wanted but could never afford?" Well, no, unless that pinball table consists of three bumpers and a few score multiplying widget things. In all honesty, I could make a better table out of toilet roll tubes, PVA glue and bottle lids. However, I wouldn't have the audacity to call myself a "constructor" once I'd finished. The table-building aspect is just another lazy, badly implemented feature that, like the opening menus, does little more than further Powershot Pinball Constructor's descent into videogame hell.

I could put a pithy little summary here, explaining all the things that are wrong with Powershot Pinball Constructor, but I'm afraid it wouldn't be strong enough. This is a horrible, horrible game. It's badly designed, badly put together and any 'innovations' it might shout about having are nothing but filler, put in to try and pad out a game that's as devoid of content as it is of fun. Even if you are a pinball game fanatic, I advise you to stay as far away from this abomination as is humanly possible.

Reviewed by Harry Slater for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).