Luv Me Buddies Wonderland – Review
When “Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows” was playing during that memorable Simpsons episode, it could have been possible it was just a prediction of things to come. Luv Me Buddies Wonderland might have been the game that they were singing about. Sadly, not all is sunshine, lollipops and rainbows in Wonderland. That being said – watch out Nyan Cat, color overdose ahoy!
Story
Luv Me Buddies Wonderland does not really posses a story outside of the small and cuddly animals you’ll meet during your play sessions in Wonderland. You’ll come across an array of different animals, each with their own name and their own environment.
Then again, the game directs itself towards younger children and thus a thick plot is not really necessary to be appealing to its target audience. The characters prove to be simple, yet distinctive enough to be original. The developers even went with a character that’s still quite cuddly but a tad darker at the same time. Beware of ‘The Count’!
Graphics
Graphically Luv Me Buddies Wonderland looks quite similar to a lot of flash games that can be found across the internet. There might be an abundance of colors but overall everything looks simple and not really that complicated. This makes the game a tad more appealing to younger children and provides a fun environment for them to learn the basic of gaming.
Sadly, the characters might look quite original with their heart shaped heads, they also lack a bit of animation. The characters are fairly static and this tends to remove a lot of their personalities.
The environments prove to be quite static as well. Each of the levels will just feature a simple looking background and a few moving objects in front of it. A little extra effort would have made the game that much more fun to look at.
Sound
Seeing that the game only takes up 89 mb of your hard disk, Luv Me Buddies Wonderland still had a decent amount of songs featured in the game. Most of these songs are quite tranquil and they don’t bore to easily. Other than that the game has a few sound effects in place but no voice acting, which again could have contributed to the likeability of the inhabitants of Wonderland.
Gameplay
As for gameplay, Luv Me Buddies Wonderland is a game in which you’ll be presented with a map, on which all the different characters appear. Each character represents a different area, in which you can unlock different mini games for you to play.
Whilst there are a decent amount of different areas to play, there aren’t that many different kinds of mini games. Games tend to repeat itself over and over throughout the game, which in the end will present you with roughly ten kinds of games. There will be mini games that will require you to point of the character of the zone you’re playing in or the exact opposite. Other times you’ll be flipping pictures to match two of a kind and on other occasions you’ll be jumping on clouds, balancing a wooden log, making puzzles, playing ‘Simon says’ and matching suits of armor. (And a few others)
Throughout the game, the GamePad proves to be quite useless. You’ll be able to select mini games with it, see your amount of lives during a mini game (which you can also see on your TV monitor) or the explanation of the said mini game you wish to select. Sadly the latter is not shown on the TV monitor and thus if you don’t have the GamePad lying next to you, you might not know what you’re going to play. This means you’ll be using your standard Wii controller throughout the game.
At the beginning of each level, you’ll never get a real explanation (on TV) of what the game expects you to do. You’ll see a simple animation of how you should hold the Wii controller and you’re good to go. This sometimes creates misunderstandings, which in the end are not that bad but having an on-screen explanation would have been a plus.
In each of the zone, you’ll have to unlock the next game by completing each game in a row. Sadly, the game does not set a goal, so you’ll never know when you have enough points to clear the current game and be able to play the next. Overall the goals are not that hard but often you won’t know which game you have cleared, seeing the game does not present a real distinctive way of telling you.
Overall the game rewards you with points but these points happen to be useless. You have nowhere to spend your points and thus you can only rack up points with no real purpose at all.
The multiplayer mode is exactly the same as the singe player mode, in which you’ll have to unlock all of the levels again. You’ll be able to play a specific set of rounds, in which you can see the scores of the players that participate. Sadly, the game has no real multiplayer mode seeing you simply have to pass the controller around. You’ll constantly have to wait until the other players are done and this takes of that extra edge.
A last set of annoyance the game provides is the fact that every time you go back to a zone, after completing a game, the character of that zone will do his intro again. After seeing the same intro for over ten or twenty times it tends to get really annoying, seeing you can’t really skip it all that fact. Last but not least, the accuracy of the game often feels off, especially on the map. You’ll never see where you’ll have to click precisely and often you’ll be pressing the button for a few times, before the game actually responds.
Conclusion
Luv Me Buddies Wonderland is a fun game for children but it’s sad that no true co-op feature was implemented in the game for parents to play together with their children (and help them). Overall the theme of the game is quite decent and the characters are appealing, sadly the content proves to be a bit on the downside. Nonetheless, if you have young children running about, perhaps look up the game and see if it appeals to you.
Luv Me Buddies Wonderland - Review,
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