Picsy Review

Ever share a photo or two with friends, family, or complete strangers on the Internet? Ever want to? Well now there’s a game for that and it’s called Picsy!

Picsy takes photos (bah-dum-pshhh!) into the realm of social multiplayer gaming, much like those that include spelling or sketching. Setting up a game with random people or friends only takes a couple of taps, then it’s time to snap those shutters. The hosting player picks a word from a small list, then each participant attempts to take a photo that they think captures the word best. Then another player or players designated judge or judges decide which image is the best. Winning a round earns coins that can be used to purchase Premium words, then a new word is chosen and everyone takes more pictures. That is to say they can snap photos, import images from their library, or paste images from the device’s clipboard.

Getting started in Picsy doesn’t take very long. The menus only feature a few very large buttons (Join Game, Friends, etc) and setting up a game takes as long as is required in order to find a full complement of players (six). Photos can be taken or imported from within the game directly, and uploading takes seconds on a decent connection. As an added bonus, it’s also pretty cool to see what so many other people can come up with.

I did have some fairly consistent crashing issues, sadly. I’m not sure why as Picsy doesn’t seem to be a terribly taxing program, but crash it did. And quite often. It also took me a while to really understand the rules as the tutorial gives enough information to get people started but kind of glosses over some important stuff like judging and general rules. The biggest problem for me personally, however, is the player requirement. A game needs several players to actually run, otherwise it just sort of sits there in limbo. This is nothing if someone is willing to spam invites to friends or constantly play with complete strangers, but I generally like to keep my online games between friends. And only friends that are actually interested in playing.

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who won’t be turned off by Picsy’s player limits, but sadly I’m not one of them. Everyone else who can enjoy will still have to fight through a few performance hiccups every now and then, but they’re bound to enjoy themselves all the same.