Review: Doodle God - PS Vita

It's only the start of 2013, but I'm ready to submit my vote for 'worst PS Vita game of the year'.

Doodle God is a game, but barely. It lets you combine worldly elements to create other elements, which you can then combine with other elements to create more elements, which can then be combined with... and on and on it goes.

There's absolutely nothing to enjoy here - it's essentially a game about tapping on circles and then tapping on other circles. On top of this, it feels broken in places too.

Doody

You play as a god, and the game tasks you with creating the entire world, bit by bit, out of four basic elements.

This involves selecting an element and then selecting another one. If the two can combine, a quick swishy animation will happen, and your new compound appears. You can then combine this one with the others, and keep doing this until you've made hundreds of them.

And this is the entire game, all presented as a series of menus and static images. It's a huge tap-a-thon, as you end up just going through icons one by one, trying them with every other icon in the desperate hope of unlocking more elements.

The game suggests that you use logic to determine which elements go with which others, but there are plenty of places where logic clearly doesn't factor in - especially when the game starts to introduce monsters like vampires and flying mages.

Apparently, combining an egg with earth makes a dinosaur (obviously!), while combining sand with a storm is impossible, despite the very real existence of sandstorms.

Oh God

Doodle God provides a hint system that will tell you every minute or so where you should look, so the game eventually turns into a process of waiting a minute, using the hint, finding the new element, then waiting another minute for the next hint.

Even more annoyingly, the game doesn't highlight matches you've already made, and when you make them again it completely changes the menus you're looking through. This is a huge pain in the backside.

To top it all off, a 'Rate or Review' box pops up every once in a while, as part of an apparently sado-masochistic attempt to encourage you to slam it.

So yes, Doodle God, I will leave you a rating: 3/10. Please make sure that the browser-based sequel is never, ever, ever released for PS Vita.