Tales to Enjoy! Three Little Pigs Review (DSiWare)

If you’ve been hanging around the site during the past two weeks, chances are you’ve at least stumbled onto one Tales to Enjoy review. These games are compilations of activities targeted at kids who are just learning how to read, write, and develop basic problem solving skills. Each one uses an identical interface, but incorporates a different fairytale and related artwork. This is a classic case of quantity over quality, and the experience suffers majorly because of this.

Unfortunately, it's much the same story with Tales to Enjoy: Three Little Pigs, which isn't necessarily a complete shambles, but stands up about as well as the first hog's house.

The storybook element, which is described as being "interactive" doesn’t really offer any interaction at all. While the voice-over reads the text on the top screen, the actor often skips whole parts of sentences. Then there are awkward pauses that make little sense and last all too long, likely to lose a child’s attention. Images that accompany the story don’t feature much animation beyond twitching characters and objects. If the voice-over issues were rectified you’d have something serviceable – even if the artwork is ugly – but in the state this is in, it’s almost broken.

None of the other seven activities – like a simple nine piece puzzle made of squares, a match-two card game, and even finding the differences between to nearly identical pictures – are quite as discombobulated, but nearly all are lacking in quality. What challenges the value of this package the most is the lack of instruction to assist the player with how things work. Kids are going to either have to figure things out on their own, or their parents will need to instruct them of the procedure. Not ideal for a game aimed at very young children.

As we continue to play through this series for review, the problems are becoming more grating and less acceptable. Had the focus been taken off the quantity of games released, and redirected to correcting the problems with the interface and adding instructions, you’d probably have a recommendation on our end. Unfortunately, with the state the game is in, even for a measly two dollars, we just can’t stand behind it in any way.