Everyone's played Jenga. It's a favourite party game and an ingenious piece of entertainment where friends (or sworn Jenga enemies) battle the world's physics and their shaky hands to try and keep an increasingly unstable tower of blocks from toppling whilst removing key chunks of it that will surely spell your opponent's doom. The game's brilliance comes from the fact that, no matter how good the player, eventually the situation becomes untenable and someone has to lose. You may be wondering why on Earth anyone would want to convert such a tactile experience to a distinctly distanced replication, and after many hours of playing I am still left wondering this very same thing.

For those who have somehow managed to avoid playing Jenga throughout their lives, I should deliver some kind of explanation as to what the real life version entails. You are issued with 50 wooden rectangular blocks that you stack up into a tower, three to a row, alternating the directions the blocks are pointing (a row of three facing north to south, then a row of three facing east to west, and so on). When the tower is assembled, each player takes turns to remove a piece from the stack, before placing this piece on the top of the tower. As the game progresses, the tower becomes increasingly unstable and will eventually fall. There isn't a winner in the game, only the losing player who makes the construction collapse, facing ridicule and the upsetting task of rebuilding the tower for the next game. Now, if I were reviewing the real game, I'd be hard pushed to find fault with it. Its graphics are nice - the blocks are smooth with no splinters - in multiplayer it's genius and the sound effects are world class, from the clatter of bricks to the inevitable expletive-laden ridicule. But what you'll notice here is that Jenga is a social delight - there's only one thing more depressing in the world than playing Jenga solo, and that's playing a digitalised version of Jenga solo. Sadly, that's the main meat of Jenga World Tour.

The one thing that attracted me to this game while my fellow writers were staring at their shoes trying to avoid eye contact with it was the name Jenga World Tour. "There's a world tour of Jenga?" I found myself asking, and curiosity got the better of me, as I half hoped it would be some bizarre management sim where you improve your stats and level up while you progress to being the most famous Jenga player in the world. Sadly, the game itself is considerably more predictable than that in the end. The world tour element comes as the main meat of the single player, where you progress through various scenarios with different and implausible themes. There's one set in the Arctic, where you'll find your blocks occasionally getting frozen and stuck, a medieval one where catapults fire at your tower and a prehistoric one where pterodactyls sporadically attempt to steal your blocks. This is gimmicky, but it does at least offer something you can't possibly replicate in the non-virtual version of the game, giving it one (very slight) advantage. Regrettably, the AI moves so fast that these hindrances don't really affect your opponent, making it all but entirely worthless in the single player portion. Other than that, there's an arcade mode where you play on your own, trying to get a high score, and a quick play mode. There are some unlockables - new character avatars - but no real incentive to get them, as they change nothing about the gameplay. But, given that the concept of Jenga is limited at best (stack blocks without making the tower fall), this isn't really a problem, as long as the game itself plays well - but predictably, it cannot hold a candle to its real-life counterpart.

You play the game holding the DS like a book, which is a pretty smart move, as the stack of Jenga blocks is quite tall and this angle allows you to see more of what's going on at any given time. You change the camera angle with the now quite uncomfortably placed D-Pad and zoom in and out using a metre at the bottom of the touch screen. You select a block by clicking on it and then use the stylus to prod, poke and slide the block out of position. Obviously the stylus works in 2D, while the main game is in 3D, so you need to adjust the camera angle to slide the blocks out at the right time. The controls work quite nicely, but still don't give the tactile feel of pushing and pulling real blocks that you should get in a game of Jenga, so the experience feels oddly detached.

Of course, the most important aspect of any interpretation of a physics-based game is the physics provided, and while Jenga doesn't have the Source engine used in Half-Life 2 by any means, it actually does a reasonably good job of ensuring that safe moves won't send the virtual stack tumbling towards the virtual floor. Of course, there are times when I've been screaming at the ludicrousness of a 'game over' scenario, but in these cases it has often been no less of a decision on the game's part than seeing me concede a goal due to Chuckle Brothers-style defending in FIFA.

The music in Jenga is pleasant enough - never distracting, but quite catchy in a midi file sort of way. Sadly, the sounds elsewhere cannot match the success here. There's a commentator of sorts who says things like "TIIIIIMBER!" when you knock a stack over and "Welcome to Jenga" when you first load it up, but he has to be one of the most smug detached voices I've ever heard. Likewise, the sound effects are crippled by the DS's tinny speakers; the crash of a tower of blocks plummeting after a gruelling duel isn't half as satisfying (once again) as the real thing.

Graphically, Jenga just about does as well as it can. The problem comes with the DS's screen resolution, as at a zoomed out view of the tower it's difficult to tell where each block ends, meaning that you have to zoom in to separate them. Of course, you then need to zoom out again to see where you're pulling the block and what effect it seems to be having on the rest of the tower, making the gameplay awkwardly stop-start, although, I suppose, this is fair enough for what is essentially a board game. The backdrops are nicely varied and although they're not the most detailed in the world, they're certainly not the worst graphics I've ever seen on the DS either.

In all of this though, I was sure that the multiplayer would offer some redemption but, with some horror, I discovered the game is multi-card play only for a maximum of two players. That means that each player needs a copy of the game - and this is absolutely unforgivable. The chances of there being two people in the same county, let alone the same room, who saw a copy of Jenga World Tour on a shop shelf and thought "that looks fun" must be incredibly low and it's an amazing way for Atari to shoot themselves in the foot. I suppose their logic must follow that they're forcing more people into buying the game to enjoy the delights of the multiplayer, but the reality is that the main game is off-putting enough to prevent anyone from rushing off to snag their own copy. At very best, the multiplayer would have been a consolation; as it is, it's a real bugbear and sees the score drop further still. If Mario Party DS can provide full download play for four players then there is absolutely no excuse for Jenga not to follow suit.

The developers of Jenga World Tour have done pretty much all they can to make the game reach its full potential - it's just that it never had much to work with. Single cartridge multiplayer would have helped a great deal, but even that wouldn't have lifted it into the average category. If it was part of a compilation like 42 All-Time Classics then it would provide better value and considerably more appeal, but as a standalone product it's just a poorly conceived conversion. A set of real life Jenga blocks retails for less than half the price of this inferior product and offers a far more entertaining experience, with built in multiplayer for as many people as you can fit in your living room. If you are itching for some physics-defying action then I suggest you stick with the real thing. Or buy Portal.

Reviewed by Alan Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).