Those CGI animated kids' films are quite marvellous things. They always manage to pitch them well for both children and adults, with daft slapstick humour mixed in alongside plenty of jokes laden with hidden meanings and layers that the grown-ups can chuckle knowingly to each other about. Although this Paint & Create design package is obviously aimed squarely at the little terrors.

It offers up a large range of possible projects, from calendars and masks, through to posters, door hangers, bookmarks and birthday cards. Adding some comedy business cards for mum and dad to mess around with was probably an idea bandied about and then ditched at the “well, maybe not” development phase.

The first thing that struck us about the program was that it felt a little bare - a little polar bare, even - sporting a distinct resemblance to the emptiness of the frozen wastes that feature in the film. There's no music and barely any sound at all apart from the occasional 'whoosh' when you drag and drop a piece of clipart. There are no help options or instructions, either. To be fair, Paint & Create is very simple to use, but a basic tutorial wouldn't have gone amiss.

Moreover, the artwork contained on the disc is thin on the ground. Sure, there are some good looking official pictures from the movie for the various template backgrounds, but many of them are repeated in different areas of the program. The clipart provided, which consists of sketched characters that can be coloured in, is very limited with only 40 pieces to work with in total.

Once you've picked your template and laid down a couple of bits of clipart, the paint package element comes into play. It's possible to colour in the black and white clipart using simple fill tools and personalise your creation with shapes, text and a freehand drawing tool. This is all reasonably well put together and easy enough to use, although younger tykes will probably struggle with the freehand drawing.

The undo function is also less than ideal, featuring only one level of undo. Yes, this is about kids messing around colouring and it isn't a proper paint package, but the trouble is, it's quite easy to make an irreversible error. For example, if you accidentally click and draw a pixel after you've made a mistake, undo will only delete the extra erroneous click.

Granted, it's then possible to get out the eraser and rub away the mess you've made, but if there are other bits of drawing near or, Heaven forbid, under the area in question, you can also end up erasing them; the eraser tool is quite imprecise. This certainly isn't ideal for younger children.

On the positive front, there are some nice ideas here, such as the party kit, which lets the user design a bunch of invitations, place settings and so forth. There is some entertainment value to be had in Paint & Create, but it could have been so much better.

Ice Age 2: Paint & Create lets you do just that, but there's a rather sparse feel to the program, what with the lacklustre presentation and limited reserves of clipart. The implementation of some of the painting aspects lacks forethought too.