EA Playground

While EA Playground appears to be aimed at a younger demographic, on the surface it boasts features that could be of interest to older players too. Now let's be honest here... just about every gamer can manage to have some mindless fun playing mini-games. The reality, though, is that neither younger nor older players will be able to find much to enjoy here.

Gameplay
At first I was optimistic about EA Playground. The novelty idea of this mini-game collection is to have a school-themed ambiance, taking you for a stroll around four different locations as you attempt to track different kids, complete their challenges, and collect stickers for your album as a result of fulfilling the conditions set by the mini-games. You also collect the in-game currency, marbles, with which you can buy even more stickers.

The sticker mechanic sounds good on paper. Tapping the bottom left of the screen gives you access to a virtual album, where everything you have collected or bought stays catalogued by category in a colorful manner. Even more interesting, these stickers act not only as collectibles, but they actually serve in-game purposes, such as giving you special skills or bonuses. Too bad this does not work... at all.

The game never gets around explaining how most special skills work, or how the bonuses are applied. Some even claim to have effects that I am almost certain they do not have - or at the very least are vastly less noticeable than what you are led to believe.

Exploring the school and its proximities could have been nice, but it is lousy. Put together, the game's four areas would compose a single decent-sized one. They are all small and cluttered, while at the same time not offering you anything interesting to do. You just talk to kids and they give you mini-game objectives. Some six or seven times you find marbles by interacting with random objects, and that's about it.

The mini-games themselves are a mixed bag. There is something for everyone here, but I don't mean that in a good sense. For a game that is theoretically aimed at kids, EA Playground can be unreasonably unforgiving. Take me for example. I am a musician in his twenties. There is an interesting rhythm mini-game included in this collection that I actually enjoyed playing, but I can't for the hell of me visualise a child who is not musically talented managing to play this thing. Past its second difficulty level (of which there are three), the notion of tempo one must have to succeed is quite demanding. It leaves no gap between rhythm repetitions, giving the player no room to ready for the next section.

I am sure that people of different interests would be able to say that they enjoyed a different mini-game of the collection than the one I did, but I am left wondering: who exactly is this game for? Mini-games like the RC Racing and Hoops will probably be entertaining for the one hour that it takes to finish them, but then you are left with crap such as Spitballs and the awful Bug Hunt, both of which you keep you playing for a bit longer only due to how bad they are.

Special mention should be made of Bug Hunt, because I'd wager it is the reason why most people do not manage to play this game to completion. Here is the idea: you have to run around a little field and catch butterflies with your net. Simple, right? Well, how about there are some bees after you? Still simple. But how about you have to control it via a ridiculous control scheme that uses the stylus to move a relatively positioned circle that has absolutely no precision, while the screen gets progressively more crowded with bees, and some of them even have the ability of chase you like heat-seeking missiles, most often than not trapping you in corners for you to get hit not once, but twice. You can take five hits before dying. I do not need to explain you the math.

Graphics and sound
I find both graphics and sound to be unremarkable. They do their job, and will mostly not get in your way. It's just generic 2D and some elevator music. The only thing that does stand out, as I mentioned previously, are the stickers. They are quite neat, and deserved better gameplay surrounding them so that they could be anything other than nice little pictures.

Replay value
Do not count on it. Nobody will come back for more of this game. Even if you do find a mini-game interesting, there is no replayability to be found. Slight variations of the same thing over and over again, spread across three difficulty levels. No extras.

Veredict
EA Playground could have been much more... stickers could enable radical changes to mini-games and your character, there could have been cool areas to explore, maybe a hint of a plot somewhere... but no. It has nothing of that. Do not buy this game. You could maybe rent it to waste a couple of hours, but that is all.