Review: Skoodlez

Written on Dec 11, 2008 by Brian and filed under Reviews, Skoodlez

Skoodlez are a Macy’s exclusive plush animal with online component that offers story making, games and other interactive activities. Each Skoodlez comes with a token with unique code that lets kids work and play on the Skoodlez website.

There are many different animals available, in addition to a series of Holiday themed animals, elves and so on. They retail for $14.99 and are appropriate for a wide range of ages. Skoodlez sent us two animals for review, Toosday the Tiger and Zanoozy the Holiday Dog. 

The quality of the plush animals is really quite impressive. In fact for the price, if you never did any of the online activities, we still think Skoodlez are worthwhile. Each one is about a foot long and has beanbag hands and feet. They sit up well thanks to the weighted apendages. We ran some rudimentary toughness tests, which included pulling arms and legs aggressively, and found our review animals to hold up very well.

As mentioned, each animal comes with a coin that has a code on the back to unlock the animal on the Skoodlez website. Once an account is created kids have access to essentially two things, a story area and a game area. Here’s where it gets a little dicey. If you watch the Skoodlez demo video, you’ll see a lot of features and unfortunately, only very few of them are actually live. And the ones that are live are pretty thin. Skoodlez is working on building out the website, but it’s clearly a work in progress. If you bought a Skoodlez based on the web demo, you’re going to be disappointed.

Let me highlight what they do have in place though. The best area is the write a story section. Within that section, there are four features. Tell Me a Story lets kids select pick three themes, based on images, for the story to be about. The story is then generated and can be read to kids with a click of a button for each page. The stories are short though. Make a Story From Words works the same way, only kids select phrases instead of pictures and the story is not read to them. 

Fill in the Blanks is the third story building mode, which works a lot like Mad Libs. Kids can select verbs, nouns and the like to fill in the blanks for a story. The system will also help kids by inserting a proper word if they need help. There’s only one story per Skoodlez though, so it gets pretty repetitive. We also noticed an issue with the dog where the story changed genders back and forth, which is confusing.

The last option is Write My Own Story, which is clearly the best feature. Kids can select scenes, then write words to go with them. The stories can be as long as they wish and offers kids with writing and creativity skills a great outlet. 

Any of the stories can be saved to your account, emailed to a friend or shared in the library with other Skoodlez owners. This last bit is a little hit or miss, while stories are approved manually for content, not all the stories really add much value, especially for kids wanting to read other creations. And aside from the manually created stories, most only offer three pages, so they’re short. One last major issue we noticed with the stories is that the text is often not readable because the white font blends in with some of the background. This was a big problem with the dog, less of an issue elsewhere, but still noticeable, look at page three of our shared story.

Aside from the stories kids can go to the fun house which at present offers one game and the ability to print out characters to color in. The game is a word matching challenge that’s probably about right for ages 5-6. Kids match an item with the proper words underneath. There are five levels that get moderately more difficult as they go.

The coloring sheets are a bit disappointing as they’re not exactly interactive coloring as the demo shows. They’re static print outs that we couldn’t get to print out without being cropped on several test systems. 

Otherwise online there’s not much else going on, however, Skoodelz promises to add more depth. We’re just not thrilled with a promotional video that shows all the things that you will be able to do, not al the things you can do today. 

Bottom Line

Skoodlez’s saving grace is great plush toy quality and the create your own story tool, which kids 6+ will probably really enjoy. We’re a bit miffed that the online tools don’t stack up to the online demo and anyone who buys Skoolez expecting a lot of online interaction is going to be disappointed. That said, they’re supposed to add more features and if so, Skoodlez will offer tremendous value at $15. As it is, they’re pretty well priced now for the plush alone, so it’s hard to complain too much. We just expected and wanted more from the online experience. More online tools would raise our rating by one star minimum.

2.5 out of 5 stars

Skoodlez are available exclusively through Macy’s.

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