Our friends from Backflip Studios are back again with another one of their fantastic new twists on an old genre.  In this one, all you need to do is hit the target with the ball.  Sounds easy enough.  The ball will drop in front of a city wall, possibly already tagged by graffiti. 

Now, by default, the ball will just drop straight down the screen.  You need to use your spray can to  draw new graffiti lines which will cause the ball to bounce or roll toward the goal.  Be careful, though, just when you think you have gotten the hang of things, the next level will add new obstacles blocking your path.  You will need to find a way to guide the ball around all of the obstacles and into the goal before time runs out.

Yeah, you heard that right.  It is not enough to simply find the goal.  Each level comes complete with a timer.  Your score for each level is based on how much time remains on the clock when you reach the goal.  In order to help you, many levels include time bonuses on the screen.  Touch one with the ball to add time to the clock.  Watch out, though, because some of these bonuses will be out of your way, and could add more time than they save. 

Each group of levels are organized by cities.  Chicago contains the easiest levels, including the tutorial.  After that, there are four more cities to be played (Brooklyn, Paris, Toronto, and Tokyo) with each city containing 20 levels.  The great thing here is that the levels can be played in any order.  Regardless of the city or difficulty, all of the levels are unlocked from the beginning so you can play them all in any order you like.

The controls are pretty basic and easy to learn.  Drag your finger on the screen to “paint” your graffiti line on the wall.  These are the lines you will use to guide the ball.  You can use the settings to decide whether the spray paint can will appear under your finger.  Beneath the playing area is a clock showing the time remaining in the level.  Menu will exit the level and take you back to the level selection screen.  Go allows you to test out the level you are building (while the ball is bouncing around, this button will become Stop, allowing you to end the test if it is not working right). 

Finally, you can use the Undo button to remove the last line drawn.  The problem here was that the last line drawn may not always be the problem.  It would have been nice to have an eraser, so you could remove any line you drew, regardless of the order.

Like many games, this one also connects to the online Open Feint system.  This means there are plenty of awards available for you to earn, as well as online leaderboards so you can compare your performance to that of players from around the world.

I thought this was a fantastic game.  The levels are quick, and the challenges increase slowly enough that you have time to learn the nuances of the game in the earlier levels, but not so slow that you get bored before reaching more difficult levels.  While the game is not technically optimized for the iPad, I downloaded the iPhone version on my iPad, and found that it worked fine.  Since the graphics are not necessarily precise in nature, any degradation from expanding the image to the larger format did not really make a large difference.  Still, I would love to see a native iPad version, which more fully utilized the space available on the larger iPad interface.

If you are looking for a quick. but challenging game to fill those lost snippets of time throughout the day, then go ahead and give this one a try. 

Graffiti Ball was developed by Backflip Studios and is available from the iTunes App Store for free.  A $0.99 in-app purchase will even get rid of those pesky ads.