Game Details

Number of Players: 

1

Peter Pan has captured the imaginations of children, especially boys, for generations. Recently, Tinkerbell has moved from sidekick to a lead role in her own series of movies and merchandise to appeal to the young ladies. Following her latest direct-to-DVD film, she makes an appearance on the Didj, but will you still believe in this fairie after this game?

Follow and move Tinkerbell around Pixie Hollow, talking to the other fairies and helping them with tasks, all of which Tink accomplishes by solving math problems: addition, multiplication, and later, greater than/less than problems, sometimes using the Commutative Property of Addition. That's basically it. The vast majority of the time playing this game is spent watching slideshow cutscenes and doing math problems. And that's the problem.

My 8-year-old spent some time with this game but got bored and stopped playing, and she likes math. She said it was too easy, and keep in mind that this is a girl who likes easy games. While players move Tink around the screen, she faces no enemies or challenges. A few levels include racing and collecting items of some kind, but players can't actually lose these games, although players earn more Bitz by collecting more or all of the items or winning the race. Either way, this makes no change to the game. In the final level, Tink has to collect items while avoiding rats, but when hit by rats, she just says, "Ow," and loses nothing, which makes for a rather anticlimactic final boss battle.

Note that the cutscenes are beautiful and probably the best graphics ever seen in a Didj game, although all images are stills. Audio also shows fine attention to detail, including great use of stereo sound when using headphones to convey depth and direction. But what's the point of giving a game artistic quality but lousy gameplay?

The game is also short, logging in at about 3 hours worth of play with little incentive to go back to play more. By the time players have played long enough to earn some bits to earn micromods, they'll have finished—if they don't stop playing before the end.

Yes, Tink, I still believe in fairies, but no, we won't be clapping to keep this game alive.