Remember that classic Othello slogan, "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master"? Apply that to videogames, add a slew of whimsical, well-drawn characters and the expansive online universe that spawned them, and you're pretty much talking Neopets Puzzle Adventure, which just hit stores for Wii after prior releases on PC and Nintendo DS.
The game's whimsical characters and comic-style art should be instantly familiar to Neopets.com visitors.
You start the game by personalizing one of 12 different Neopets and selecting your play mode: Instant Action, which throws you right into the game's titular puzzles, or Story Mode, which puts you into the three Lands of Neopia (whose landscapes should be instantly recognizable to kids familiar with Neopets.com) and lets you compete in a series of challenges against other Neopets. Minigames -- including a fun, easy memory game that will delight young players -- also abound and help to break up the story-based play.
The Neopets' main challenges revolve around deceptively simple, Othello-style puzzle gameplay.
The game's puzzle challenges may be called "battles," but there's nothing in the way of violence here: Instead, Neopets Puzzle Adventure finds players taking turns laying down tokens on a grid, with the
winner being the one who can convert the most tokens to his or her color. If you're thinking it sounds a lot like Othello (or Reversi), good call: The similarities aren't just limited to a slogan, and if you're looking for a simple game that requires kids to put some strategic brainpower behind their onscreen actions, even grade-schoolers can rule in this conquest.
There's plenty of room to explore in the Lands of Neopia.
Also, while it may seem easy to breeze through, Neopets Puzzle Adventure has several features that'll keep kids engaged outside of the puzzle challenges. As your Neopet proceeds through the game, it can collect 150 different PetPet companions, each of which packs powers that can help you back on the game grid. The game also generates codes to unlock special items on Neopets.com, so if your kids haven't already set up camp there, they'll have plenty of incentive to do so now. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, by the way -- though the site has many immersive, community-oriented features and boards, all kids under age 13 must have a parental-consent form mailed or faxed to the company before they can use the interactive content.
Neopets Puzzle Adventure is rated "E" for Everyone by the ESRB. Get it at Amazon in any of the following formats:
Wii ($39.99)
DS ($29.99)
PC (from $19.99)
