The seven games: marbles, chicken herding, volleyball, dodge ball, lawnmowers, chemistry and R/C racing outstay their welcome fairly quickly, if only for the lack of variety found in each of them. You can race around the same four tracks for only so long before you become tired and ultimately bored with the game. Sometimes the game does show signs of promise but the AI in the offline game is rather laughable and will prove to be a challenge to only the most simple-minded of gamers.
There’s an interesting story mode in place but again, the execution falls flat. You’ll have to do certain things in order to participate in games. For instance if you want to participate in the lawn mower races you’ll have to find the appropriate kid who runs it (the farm girl of course) and she’ll tell you what you need to do. After you find some gas you’ll be able to participate. You really don’t have enough time to find the stuff and play the games thanks to
My Street’s puzzling time system.
Then you realize that there’s a single-game mode where you can play the games at your own leisure. This mode’s inclusion really negates the story mode’s purpose as it places all the games at the tips of your fingertips instead of having to work to unlock them.
To its credit the character design is pretty nice. Each mini-game has a suitable character to go along with it. A Jamaican beach bum who lives in (what else) a beach hut mans the volleyball game while the geeky kid runs the chemistry game. What the game accomplishes in character design and variety is really diminished when it comes to personality and dialogue.
The kids have tons of things to say; too bad none of their words are really meaningful or entertaining. In fact, most of the time they don’t even sound like kids but instead, sound like adults who are trying too hard to fit in with their teenage children. To put things into perspective, every kid in the game sounds like he or she is doing a bad Eugene Levy impersonation. Lines like “you don’t have the bling-bling” will have you cringing every time you hear it.
I was hoping that the online aspect would save the game but sadly, that’s just not fun either. I couldn’t even find anyone to play with and had to resort to asking a writer from another publication to sign on just so that I could test the game. As a positive the game does run pretty lag-free but that’s most likely attributed to the relative emptiness of the game.
While the concept and idea behind the game is pretty cool I can’t help but give the game a low rating. Sure I love the premise, I mean who doesn’t dream about being 12 and running around the school yard every now and then, but while it may have sounded good on paper, it’s rather abysmal in practice. It’s not fun for children, it’s not fun for adults and it’s definitely not fun for the teenagers. Unless you’re searching for a reason, albeit a weak one, to justify the purchase of your network adaptor, avoid this one at all costs.
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Sony F
Well the R/C cars and lawnmowers are pretty fun, but 7 mini-games can only take you so far.
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