Draw Something- Insanely popular version of Pictionary, great fun all around!
Draw Something has taken the mobile games industry by storm, in a little over a month from when the app launched it has been downloaded by over 25 million users. That’s some serious momentum. To put that into perspective that equates to roughly 10 million active users a day, making it the fastest downloaded application of all time.
So what’s all the fuss about?
As with all games that quickly capture the public’s imagination, the gameplay is simple. You are given a set of 3 words, from which you need to choose one to draw out on a blank canvas so that your partner can guess that word correctly.
Each word varies in difficulty, with the difficult ones rewarding you more coins. Although the game isn’t especially ground breaking in terms of originality as it’s basically the same as Pictionary. What Draw Something offers is the raw fun gameplay of Pictionary with the convenience of a mobile game. The game is turn based so that neither you or your partner need to be online at the same time.
The beauty of Draw Something comes in its implementation. Setup is easy, you just need to provide an email address and username, no email verification is required either. You can also link it to your Facebook account allowing you to show your profile picture to others. I found this quite useful when playing other people as it allowed me to tailor my drawings to my partner. For instance, if I knew they were older then I would more inclined to pick the more difficult words to draw.
The best feature of this game in my opinion is that it shows you a stroke by stroke playback of your partner’s drawing, including your partner’s reaction to your own school kid sketches. I am constantly impressed by the deduction skills of some players as they easily guess my half complete doodles. Although I am equally shocked by how some people can expect others to guess their own bad attempts at depicting words.
Draw Something doesn’t come without flaws though.
After playing the game for a week, I had already seen many words before, apparently there are 900 words to choose from but this number obviously needed to be higher. The drawing precision on the touch screen was not accurate enough, it was very difficult to use the smallest brush and as a consequence a missing undo button was very often needed. There is no way to exit your current move and swap between moves with other players, as sometimes I would like to prioritise my friends over random players.
It was slightly annoying that you only get a limited colour palette of black, red, blue and yellow to begin with. Missing the all important green, it was difficult to draw any sort of plant life but the greater challenge often provided greater reward when your partner is successful at guessing your word. Luckily it doesn’t take too many coins to buy additional colours, I did it without even having to reach for my wallet!
In addition to the flaws, there are several areas in which the game could be improved. It would be nice to be able to save a drawing and share it on Facebook as well as a method of chatting with your partner outside of the drawing canvas.
Verdict: 5/5 Despite its minor negatives, there are plenty of positives to this little gaming gem. All in all, Draw Something offers many hours of rewarding entertainment, not only with random people but also socially with friends and family. Drawsome!
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