In Let’s Create! Pottery HD, making pottery becomes your hobby. As you become more well known through the game’s “email” system with computers, people offer you cash for specific pottery designs they want. Along with making specific pots, you can make any sort of pottery you want, then auction it off in-game. With the cash you earn from both sources, you can buy colors and patterns in the in-game shop to decorate your creations.

Let’s Create! Pottery practically looks real. The wheel and pot are rendered in 3D, and you can tilt to see more angles of the pot. Behind every scene is a blurred forest background that looks amazing in the game. The menus are all white, and look great. They’re easy to navigate and very simple.

A common element of the menu is a sliding menu at the top of the screen with rounded squares showing colors and patterns to choose from. If you’re trying to replicate a pot on the wheel, you can also tap the corner of the picture provided in an email, and it pops out.

Control on the pottery wheel is simple. Slowly slide your finger up, down, left, or right, to stretch the pot in that direction. The game allows for a certain number of rows you can move.

While you can’t make certain designs, such as flat areas or a spherical pot with a tiny hole on top, there’s plenty of room to make most pots you could think of. Once you press the firing button in the lower right corner, the game sends your pot to the virtual kiln, where it is fired ridiculously fast. (I’m glad Infinite Dreams didn’t go freemium and make you wait for the pot to finish.) Your pot is then put on a circular table for painting. You can look through your brushes or paint, to decorate the pot. Brushes have designs which you can apply by sliding up and down on the pot, and watching where the highlighted white goes.

You can also paint the pot different colors by sliding your finger up and down on the pot, and staying the same place to make heavier paint. Your pot is then auctioned off or sent to the emailer, or you can keep it in your inventory to look at. The game also works in every orientation, which is nice. However, if you use the orientation lock, it sets it to landscape with the home button on the left, which is a bug.

With over twenty emails sent to you in the game, the “career” mode lasts a while. Even after that, you can still make endless amounts of pottery, and try to buy all the patterns in the shop. This is also a great game to show off your iPad, since it wouldn’t be possible on anything other than a touchscreen device, and it’s positioned for the more casual market. This could be the first unique casual game for the iPad. It appeals to the same market as many games on the DS and Wii.

The bottom line is that Let’s Create! Pottery HD is a great deal for all iPad owners. Casual gamers will enjoy it even more than most, especially if they like pottery. With very few bugs, this game is a semi-realistic experience that brings out the most fun parts of pottery making, while leaving out the boring ones.