Review: Neopets Learning Game for LeapFrog Didj

Written on Jul 8, 2009 by Thomas S. and filed under LeapFrog, Reviews

Explore the land of Neopia while healing cursed faeries and learning language arts skills.  The Neopets learning game for the LeapFrog Didj teaches and enforces contextual spelling, possessive nouns, parts of speech, and subject-verb agreement for 7-10 year olds.  It’s a low-pressure game where your child explores the game world, collects items, completes quests, and gathers petpets by playing educational games with them.

Game Play

Getting started is very simple.  You choose the character (one of three cute characters) that you’d like to start the game with and you get brought up to speed with the storyline.  All the faeries in Faerie City are cursed by the evil villian, Quizara.  The gates of Faerie City are closed, but the brave Neopets have taken up the challenge to cure the faeries and get them to safety in Faerie Haven.  Once all the faeries are cured, the gates to the city will open and the Neopets can defeat the Question Curse at its source.

Your character starts in Faerie Haven, and at the beginning, it’s pretty empty, but you’ll find places where your befriended petpets will hang out and where you can place decorations that you collect.  This is also where the rescued faeries hang out until you’ve taken care of Quizara.  Once you’re ready to start, you just head through a magic portal and view the world map.  At the beginning, there’s only one place that you can explore – Meridell.  Once you’ve explored more, there are other areas available to you.  Each area consists of one or more sections that can be explored.

Once you’ve entered the area to explore, there are little containers, that look like acorns, that can be opened to find food items, magic items, or items to decorate Faerie Haven.  There are also other characters in the world that will take to you and some may have mini-quests for you – which usually consist of finding a particular item.  During your explorations, you will come upon “petpets”, who will want to play a game with you.  If you play with them, you’re then presented with one of the learning exercises.  If you complete it successfully, the petpet follows you back to Faerie Haven.   You will also encounter cursed faeries, and if you possess the right kind of magic, you can attempt to cure them.  You can use magic or an item to cure the faerie.  If you use magic, this is another type of learning exercise.  Complete it successfully, and you cast your magic on the faerie to cure it.   Once cured, the faeries hang out in Faerie Haven.

Exploring Neopia	Playing with a petpet
Game to save faerie	Success! Casting healing magic

The educational games within the game are easy to figure out how to accomplish and the first time you do a particular type, you get directions.  You can also use the left shoulder button to hear instructions again.  Most of the educational games involve picking the right word or letters to finish a sentence correctly.  Other games have you work on picking the subject in a given sentence.  They range from fill in the blank (like curing the faerie above) to moving your character to grab the right word, to a more active game where you cast a magic spell to hit the right word (see below).  Questions will adjust to your child’s success rate – if they answer all the questions easily, the questions will increase in difficulty more quickly.

Hit the right word with a magic spell

The controls are extremely easy to use.  Really, the only controls you need while exploring are the directional pad for movement, and the “A” button to interact with containers, other characters and with faeries.  The “B” button is used to access several screens like status (your character’s happiness level, magic level and experience leve), inventory, the area map, a list of badges and bitz, and a quest journal.

The Home button on the Didj gives you a menu to go back to Faerie Haven, view the world map, quit game, modify sound effects and music and change the inventory styles.

Customizations

During the game, you’ll encounter golden pedestals, which block access to a Secret Space.  In order to move these pedestals, you need to spend accumulated Bitz (using the Leapfrog Connect software).  Other customizations include inventory styles and menu styles which just modify the look and feel of the inventory screens and menus.

Customizations

Unlock Secret Spaces

Bottom Line

Neopets is a cute, entertaining, and not-at-all-intimidating game.  I hear that it’s actually the favorite game in the playgroup that my wife and son frequent.  The game is absolutely simple to get started with, with some in-game instruction filling in some of the finer details.  The learning content is perfectly set for the advertised age group (7-10 year olds) and the question difficulty adapts to your child’s success in completing the learning exercises.  Customizations are almost crucial to the game – you can’t get into those Secret Spaces without spending those Bitz and there are even virtual prizes that can be claimed if you set up an account on the neopets.com website.

4.5 out of 5 stars – Editor’s Choice