Reviewed by Tiffany Craig
The market for children’s games is saturated with release after release of cartoon and gaming favorites. Spongebob and Shrek join forces with the Mario-verse to dominate the wish list of many a little one. Getting a game in edgewise amongst all that competition is tough; publishers need a sturdy release to win them over. The Quest For Aladdin’s Treasure is just one trying to muscle in on the action.
You play as Aladdin, the Disney-style Aladdin, trying to rescue the fair princess Jasmine from the evil Jafar. But this time your adventures show no inclination toward swashbuckling feats. Instead, you have to use your mighty intellect to defeat various puzzles. You start with caves, where you have the classic challenge of sliding tiles to make various pictures. Then move on to other types of puzzles like moving blocks and getting through mazes.
Controls are certainly easy enough for the 3+ rating. You can only move up, down, left and right and there are no camera controls. You’re plunked down in the middle of a vast desert and left to locate each temple separately. Inexplicably they don’t include a map anywhere in this desert flying phase and things look so similar it can be hard to tell what’s a big pile of rocks and what’s a puzzle providing cave. As a result it takes a fair amount of trial and error, plus an attention span, to remember which caves and temples you’ve visited.
Those smaller elements are where this game falls over. While it’s a nice idea to release a decent puzzle game based on Aladdin geared toward the world’s moppets, you have to get the niceties in all the right places. Adults may be bullheaded enough to try and figure out how to solve a puzzle, but children soon lose interest. There’s never an explanation of how to get through the various caves and temples or what the jewels mean, you have to work out the goal behind each obstacle yourself. Nor is the objective outlined at the beginning of each puzzle. You have to guess what that is as well. Easy enough for adults to solve, but anyone below the age of 10 will probably just get bored. Tutorials could have made all the difference here, but are sadly missing.
Unusually, for a children’s game, the graphics seem sedate. The candy sweet figures in Nintendo style are replaced with primitive standard graphics. And while the landscape is full of simple outlines and primary colors, I can’t help but think it just isn’t interesting enough to keep kids, well, interested.
Likewise, the music is good, for a casual game. It isn’t terribly irritating but nor is it all that memorable. The inclusion of two British television stars, Matthew Macfadyen and Keeley Hawes from spy drama Spooks, is designed more to intrigue the parents than their little ones and fall flat with anyone else.
Aladdin fails by trying to straddle the divide between a decent computer arcade game and something simple enough to engage kids. The trouble is while it stretches to both it achieves neither. It’s too short for parents but not simple enough for children. The lack of clear map and tutorial confused me and I’m legally recognized as an adult. In a market where Shrek and Spongebob dominate in familiar decent graphics and the Wii makes it possible to hit things, Aladdin probably won’t get them in that far.