Fisher-Price has a popular line of construction toy sets for young children called Imaginext. Pop-together pieces that can be attached in various arrangements, these toys have garnered good reviews from parents. Now Vivendi has produced two titles based on these toys, Pirate Raider and Battle Castle.
These two titles are simplified turn-based strategy games that are set-up similar to adult games like Heroes of Might and Magic, Majesty and other like games that feature a combination of fighting, resource gathering and building. As these games are designed for young children, each of these elements has been modified to be easy to accomplish.
The wicked Dragomont, a lizard-like creature, is determined to take over the kingdom with his horde of goblins, ogres and dragons. Your job is to defend the kingdom by reclaiming captured castles, fighting enemy knights, preventing the takeover of castles under siege and rescuing prisoners. Upon completing these missions, the victorious knight will become king!
At the beginning of the adventure, the story and goals are explained. A helpful squire is on hand to lead the players through the missions, the first few which are easy tutorials, designed to demonstrate the different game elements. The gameplay centers around four main types of play: a third-person, top-down exploration of a map; arcade play in a 2D scrolling platform mode; arcade play in an action, reflex driven manner; and a building area.
There are around twenty-five missions, and each one has the goals displayed in an iconic list that uses pictures to show the goals. As each goal is accomplished, a check mark is shown over the icon. The goals are a mix of finding treasure, rescuing or preventing sieges of castles and liberating prisoners. To rescue prisoners, a platform game is played where the knight must run through a sideways scrolling dungeon, jumping and ducking obstacles to reach the prisoner. Money can be collected along the way. This game is quite fun, and easy enough to not frustrate, but challenging enough not to bore.
The other two arcade games consist of running back and forth along a wall to push ladders off the wall to prevent ogres from coming over, and firing a cannon at enemy cannons that keep appearing randomly, until the enemy is defeated and the castle won.
The main part of each mission involves exploring each corner of a map to find treasure, potions, castles and various enemy knights to battle. Movement is accomplished by using either arrow keys on the keyboard, or using the mouse to click on arrow keys on the bottom menu of the screen. This type of movement doesn't translate very well on this game for some reason, and the knight moves around the screen in a flashing, very jerky manner. After a set amount of successful missions, the knight upgrades to better armor and gains vehicles, which allow for a smoother movement than when on foot.
Fighting other knights simply consists of whacking repeatedly with a sword, until someone's health points run out. Again, this is awkward as the actual fight is hard to begin, since the enemy knight keeps moving away, and your knight moves very slowly and jerkily toward him. I believe having a mouse-controlled movement as in most strategy games of this type would have worked much better. Winning these fights gains castle pieces which can be used to build the knight's castle, which can be accessed at any time during the game.
Both these games are something new on the edutainment market; I've not seen any games before for children that are similar. It's actually a great idea, giving young children a taste of what the strategy games mom and dad play are like. Accomplishing the missions gives children a nice feeling of success, and the varied types of gameplay keep everything interesting. However, a few things could have been improved to make the game even better, namely a better method of locomotion for the knight. Also, there are too many interruptions of the gameplay during missions, which can be slightly distracting; maybe bigger maps with more room to just roam and explore would have helped in this area. And, in Pirate Raider, kids can take money won and buy their building parts for the ship; in Battle Castle, the pieces are automatically won in fights, it would have been more fun to purchase them.
These are niggling concerns, however, and on the whole this is a nicely done game that is very entertaining for boys and girls. There is nothing overtly educational about it, but there's nothing wrong about playing games just for fun! Best for kids ages 6-9
