Nanda's Island is one of those physics games where you guide water to a goal. There are lots of variations on the theme, but Nanda's is pretty simple: you guide water to seeds in order to make them grow. It's bright and cheery, with blue skies and colorful plants. Nanda, the main character, is a panda shaman who lives in the dry island. He's kind of cute, with a feather headband, and a simple rain dance animation. But your focus won't be on him anyway. It will be on watching the path of the water, which, disappointingly, is made of little square pixels. Part of the fun of these games is watching some water-like substance run up and down the paths you've created, sloshing around, splashing, but here, you've got to use your imagination a bit more.

The sound is adequate for the setting and type of game you have here. The Native theme isn't carried too strongly, it's just peaceful background music with the occasional soft drumbeat that doesn't really distract you from your task, but doesn't do much otherwise. The sound effects are likewise - drips and pops, sizzles from evaporating water. It's enough to let you know what's happening in the game as you pan around, looking for your next course of action.

Nanda, the panda of Nanda's Island, is something of a shaman in training. The only skill he's learned is the rain dance, and he's determined to use it to bring his dry world back to life. Nanda's Island is, as mentioned, a physics-based puzzle game. Each level begins with a rain cloud that is ready to start pouring water. You'll need to guide that precious water to a seed in order to make Nanda's dry world bloom again.

Unlike other games in the genre, Nanda's Island gives you a bit more of a feeling of control. To guide the water to where it needs to go, you simply draw lines for it to give it a ramp, or a wall where needed. You can also control the pace of the game by drawing little reservoirs to stop the water. This feeling of control is perhaps, just a feeling, as the water doesn't always behave like you'd think it should.

A few different types of plants add challenge to the game. The Target Plant is your main goal, the place you want to ultimately send all the water. Along the way, you might encounter the Fountain Plant, which will launch water in a high arc across the map. The Watering Plant is one that will supply you with more water when it is watered, helping you reach your watering goal for the Target Plant. You also need to control your ink usage along the way. You can erase your previous lines when they aren't needed in order to recover ink for use in the rest of the map.

There are a couple of ways to play the game. You can do the traditional Puzzle Mode, which lets you beat each level in order of difficulty. In this mode, you can earn little things to liven up the map view of the island like birds or elephants. Or you can play Arcade Mode, which lets you play any level from the start, but places restrictions like limited lives on the gameplay. You can earn more by scoring well on each level, and you can compete for a high score with, well, whomever else is playing the game on your DS.

Because you can control the pacing of the game, Nanda's Island isn't as difficult as it could be. The addition of a timer would be just about all it needs in order to make it a genuinely hard game. But usually, each level is beatable on the first go since you can collect all the water in little pools that you draw and then use that free time to scan the map to plan your attack. I say usually, because some of the plants in the game can make the map unpredictable, mainly the Teleport Plants. These plants will teleport the water they collect to some other point on the map, which you'll have to guess at, or simply learn for the next try at the map.

But even these plants can be somewhat predictable based on the flow of the map. You can usually guess that if there's a big danger for your water on the opposite side of the map (such as a hot stone that will evaporate your water) then the Teleport Plant will probably end up dropping your water right there.

For a physics-based game, Nanda's Island has some rather large physics problems. Sometimes water will get stuck on ceilings. Little craters and dips I can somewhat understand, but the fact that it gets stuck in ceilings is pretty depressing, and just an indicator of how little is going on behind the scenes here. Sometimes water will get stuck in the lines you draw as well, for no apparent reason. Actually, it happens pretty often, I'd say at least once a level. The water that gets stuck in your lines can sometimes be freed by erasing the line, but this often means it will fall to some part of the map where it will be wasted. It's pretty frustrating to be denied a perfect score because one little bit of water is stuck on a wall, or one of your helpful lines.

The drawing mechanic works pretty well, but it does seem like the game wasn't created for the small DS screen. A pixel can sometimes be the difference between your water flowing as it should, or being held back. It just seems like your stylus is a bit big and clunky for the game, but it is manageable with some practice. I can see a very young player (or someone with large hands) being a little frustrated with the fine art of line drawing in this game.

If you're a bit obsessive about these kinds of things, Nanda's Island will probably end up driving you crazy. But as a laid back time-waster, this game does fine. Nanda's Island is actually fun to play. Graphics and physics issues aside, this is what you buy games for, in the end.