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Crayola Treasure Adventures is a digital coloring game with a non-violent puzzle-solving adventure portion. If your little one is always begging to play with your DS, but you don't want little Suzie learning about shooters or crime scenes just yet, this can be a good entry point for your pint-sized gamer.

There are two modes for Crayola Treasures: adventure and coloring book. While some of the coloring book images are available right out of the box, you need to complete the adventure mode to unlock all of the options.

Coloring book has a whopping 110 pictures spread across six categories: farm, vehicles, dinosaurs, ocean, zoo and adventure. Ultimately, your little artist has 120 different crayons to work with. Initially, I found only the farm pictures to be available and a really limited set of crayons. I decided to jump back to adventure mode and check that out before giving the coloring book a more thorough look.

The adventure is pretty simple (it is designed for kids after all) and can easily be completed by an adult in under an hour. There is reading involved, so if your child wants to complete the adventure themselves before they can get into the coloring, you're going to need to stick close to read the text and help with instructions (and in a few places, you might just need to help them complete the challenge).

Your guide through all parts of the game is a red crayon named Tip. He gives instructions and advice in a little thought bubble in the upper screen of the DS. You might see a "Tip's tip" that it's a bad idea to use a real red crayon on the DS screen. He also makes little comments like, "Isn't it fun to make new friends?"

The adventure begins with a crisis of color. Someone has stolen the three magical color crystals! Wherever the thief goes, objects lose their color. You have to find these crystals and restore the world to its normal hue.

There are three stages of the game — one for each crystal. You'll begin in the jungle, move to the desert and then finish on a tropical island. Each stage has nine locations that must be traversed to clear the stage. In each level, you'll go through the same series of challenges three times. Initially, you'll have a small jigsaw puzzle to solve (nine pieces on the jungle level and 12 pieces on the desert and tropical island levels).

The story is that by solving the puzzle, you and Tip know where you need to go next. Once you've solved the puzzle, Tip moves you to that location. You'll have various items in the screen that are rainbow-colored. Touch the item with the stylus, and it reveals a connect-the-dots puzzle. At most, you'll have nine dots to connect. Each dot is numbered, so your child will need to be able to connect the dots in numeric order. After you connect the dots, the item returns to its normal color. After all the items are returned to normal, you go to the next puzzle. This time you'll see an item that loses all of its color, leaving only an outline. One at a time, parts of the picture will flash. You have to use the stylus to color this part as quickly as possible. The last such coloring puzzle in each stage is your "boss" battle. You have a lot of bits to color and not much time to do it to reveal the thief and reclaim one of the color crystals.

The little jigsaw puzzles are pretty easy to do. I don't see a child having much trouble with these. The pieces are all in the correct orientation so they don't need to rotate anything. Once the piece is in the right position in the puzzle frame, it snaps into place and can't be moved again.

The connect-the-dots puzzles went from basic outlines to slightly more complicated shapes, but it's still just a matter of following the numbers. You can draw lines between the dots or tap each dot in order with the stylus. Either way, the little picture draws itself.

The speed coloring was the section that caused me the most concern. This section is timed, but there's no timer or anything to show how much time you have left. You're pretty much madly scrubbing at the touch screen with the stylus to fill in each section in turn before time runs out. I know Tip the crayon gives a tip to not press too hard, but I wince at the thought of younger hands abusing my poor touch screen trying to get through this part. The timer was so short that I had to redo more than one of these challenges. I could see the boss battles especially causing some frustration to the younger child.

After I finished the relatively brief adventure mode (only 27 puzzles total), I went back to the coloring section. I think even the younger kids would be able to understand the settings once you've explained them. First they pick the type of picture they want to color, and then they pick the individual picture. The drawing screen has the chosen shape with an all white background. You have big and small drawing tips (tap to choose) and can go for a crayon or marker affect. There's a little eraser to fix any mistakes. Each drawing starts with three default colors, but it's easy to tap the little orange triangle and go into the bigger crayon box. You can tap to one of the main color areas quickly and then scroll through the color range from there. I found by trial and error that the white and black crayons are all the way at the right end of the assortment.

The coloring process is designed to be pretty errorless. You will be able to color only inside (or outside) the lines of the area where you first touch with the stylus. Unless you're dealing with a tiny detail area and don't manage to touch inside the outline, you're in no danger of coloring outside the lines. The white space around each figure is nice for creative additions to the basic drawing.

Once you've unlocked everything in adventure mode, Crayola Treasure Adventures offers a good amount of coloring fun for your younger child.

Overall, this wasn't a bad game, but I had some issues. I worry about the health of my touch screen with some games. A child with pre-reading skills can't really play the adventure without help. The adventure portion is definitely short. I have concern that the speed-coloring challenges might be too hard for the younger child. There's only one automatic save game for the adventure, so if you have more than one child, they'll just have to keep building on each other's game. The coloring part of the game is nice — both in picture variety and color assortment — but make sure your child isn't the kind that will fuss about not being able to keep the completed picture. There's no way to save a colored drawing and no facility to print it (which would have been nice, given the DS Wi-Fi capability).

Finally, the price tag is what gives me the biggest pause. Currently I'm seeing it for just under $30. I think a price closer to $20 would have been more reasonable, but I guess the customer is paying to have the Crayola brand name.

If Crayola Treasure Adventures sounds like something that would keep your child busy while you wait in line at the grocery store or during a long ride in the car, the game might well be worth the cost to you. For me, I'd rather buy my daughter a giant box of crayons and a few coloring books. At least then we'd have a pretty picture to show for it at the end of the day.