When it comes to app design, excellent artistry can only take you so far. Despite its refreshingly funky visuals and charming premise, Catball Eats It All just doesn't have very enjoyable gameplay to back up its unconventional style.

Playing like a mix between Kirby and Katamari Damacy, you must roll the voracious Catball around a series of labyrinthine levels, chowing down on everything from rhinos to colorful ampersands. The 12 trippy levels look like the works of Doctor Doolittle if he were a graffiti artist, depicting bug-eyed bears and sharks with swagger (they're actually by the Philadelphia-based painter NoseGo). The goal is to guide the feline puffball towards every last morsel of food, until you've grown big enough to devour the entire level.

But the wonderfully weird art and silly premise are completed undermined by floaty controls. More often than not, the collision detection's wonky: Catball occasionally refused to eat the object he was standing on, and I was constantly getting stuck on nigh-invisible geometry. Few things are as maddening as losing a level because you got wedged between blocks, or because Catball was endlessly orbiting around the last edible chunk of mural. When you fail to eat everything within the time limit, ominous dubstep music kicks in as you're devoured by Dogwall, the comically colossal canine straight out of Garfield's most chilling nightmares.

After you've seen all the levels, there's really not a whole lot to do. Catball can be completed in a single two-hour sitting, and by then, the game's lone music track will have gone from being peppy to torturous. If you're looking for a distinctive single-dollar app, this is definitely it — but you might have more fun looking at NoseGo's art online than feeding Catball.

The bottom line. With content that'll quickly bore adults and may frustrate kids, Catball's awesome artwork can't substantiate the mediocre gameplay.