Lazy Game Design

My daughter played “Batman: Strength In Numbers”. She outgrew it, and needed something more challenging. After receiving “Batman: Multiply Divide and Conquer”, she told me that the maze is exactly the same, and the villains she fights are also the same. This is lazy game construction. Leap Frog simply took the previous game and changed the challenge questions, changed the floating stones to float vertically instead of horizontally, and made the villains a little harder to kill. That’s pretty much it. Different villains in a different maze would have made the game more unique.

Also, the hints need help. One question was, what’s 900 times 70. My daughter used the hint button which simply told her the shortcut way of how to do the problem. Ignore the zeros and then add them at the end of whatever 9 times 7 is. Not cool. My daughter had no idea why this short cut worked. I did a math exercise with her to help her see the pattern in order for her to understand why it worked. Other Leapster mathematical games gave visual representations along with the hints, and did not do short cuts. For a company that advertises learning games, they need to step up and follow current studies which show that students need to understand the fundamentals, and the long way of doing math, before they can understand the short cuts of math, with the use of as many visual aids and hands on activities as possible.

Hence I am rather disappointed with this game.
The only reason why it did not get a lower than a three out of five is that my daughter is still having fun with the game.

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