SDK Paint (Wii U) Review

SDK Paint is almost exactly what it says on the tin, and the keyword here is "almost." It's a standard paint utility, except that it's missing a few critical components: the only way to draw something is to do it by hand. There is no straight line tool and no tool for drawing circles or squares.

This lack of tools, however, is tertiary to the main problem: SDK Paint is prone to freezing to the extent that a forced shutdown of the Wii U is required. With a fully up-to-date Wii U and an up-to-date version of the game, between five and ten minutes of painting is all that can be expected before SDK Paint freezes, and the only way to proceed is to power down the console.

Aside from its frequent crashing, SDK Paint is a robust piece of software. The biggest drawback is that there are only two ways of drawing anything: a paintbrush tool (with adjustable sizes) and a spray-paint tool. Any given project consists of five layers, which makes it a lot easier to paint complex images (until it crashes), and display from these layers can be turned on and off at the simple click of a button. Included are a few stencils to assist in painting, but, even with the titles underneath, it is difficult to tell what the stencils are supposed to be.

The gallery is pretty cool, as SDK Paint includes a variety of buildings through which to walk and view creations that are hung on the walls as decorations. The overhead lights can even be deactivated, leaving the player to walk through the gallery in first-person perspective and with a flashlight. It's a nice bit of extra flair. It's too bad HullBreach Studios was working on this flair rather than stability.

SDK Paint also includes a sharing feature, allowing players from all over the world to share creations. At the time of this writing, there was, unfortunately, no one sharing their work and no one with who work could be shared, so the functionality of this feature remains unknown. It's also possible that there were other players attempting to share art but the sharing feature doesn't work.