Crayola Treasure Adventures
Score: 65% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Crave Developer: DC Studios Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 Genre: Family/ Miscellaneous
Graphics & Sound: If you've seen Crayola Treasure Adventures in a screenshot, you've pretty much seen it all. This is a game about coloring, after all, so everything pretty much looks like blank pages in a coloring book. Cartoon outlines of dinosaurs and farm animals and the like await your artistic touch. The Adventure mode of the game is the only non-coloring area, and you are basically rewarded with a color picture when you complete an activity. Nothing here is going to dazzle young kids, but it's simple, and colorful, and that's probably all they were going for. The music and sound effects are pretty limited. You've got a handful of happy, simple tunes accompanying everything you do. In the coloring portion of the game, you can turn off the background music - you know, if you need to get centered and focus while you color (or if you just get tired of it). There aren't any voices and there aren't many sound effects at all. Simple is what you get here.
Gameplay: A red crayon is your guide for Crayola Treasure Adventures. In Adventure mode, he takes you to several locations in pursuit of the "color crystals." I'm still not really sure what they are, but hey, they are needed to create colors in the world. When they are separated, they suck away all the color around them. You follow the red crayon around and restore color by completing various activities. You do three things in this game: solve jigsaw puzzles, color and play connect-the-dots. Well, the last two things were entertaining enough when I was a kid being brought to Shoney's for breakfast, so I suppose it will do the trick for kids with a DS now. You just probably want to keep the scrambled eggs away in this case. The activities themselves work fine, there just aren't that many of them. You'll probably end up just coloring the pictures with this game, and that's fine. But if you want a full box of crayon colors to color with, you'll have to go through the Adventure mode and complete the repetitious activities.
Difficulty: Crayola Treasure Adventures isn't hard at all. It will only take a while to accomplish some activities. There aren't any penalties for not completing an activity, you'll be allowed to keep going until you complete it. If you've got a real young kid on your hands, however, you may want to keep watch while they play this game. The speed-coloring in Adventure mode encourages some pretty heavy scribbling. A DS can only take so much, so if they're heavy-handed it could spell the end for certain areas of the touch screen. The Adventure mode of the game is the only part that is goal-oriented, so if you're worried about a difficult game, you can keep in mind that a kid can always go straight to the Coloring Book mode for some quick fun.
Game Mechanics: Color, connect-the-dots, and drag-and-drop puzzle pieces: that's the formula for Crayola Treasure Adventures. You can't mess much up with a formula as simple as that. In the connect-the-dots game, the numbers are kind of small, so that's the only drawback I can really see there. Also, there's no notice or warning when you do something wrong, so you could just potentially tap the stylus all over and not really learn your numbers. I imagine that learning numbers is the main intention of this game, because it's not as fun as the old-fashioned connect the dots game I remember. You know, the one where when you connect the dots, you make a picture. Here, the game draws out a bunch of lines every time you connect a dot, so you're not really making the picture yourself. But here I am criticizing a game of connect-the-dots, so take that for what you will. One valid concern is that you can't save your artwork. You go in and color a masterpiece, but you can only show it to someone if you leave the picture open and your DS on. You know what, I'm starting to miss crayons and paper all of a sudden. They have all these convenient features that we can't seem to duplicate in an electronic medium. Still, the Coloring Book mode is a lot of creative fun when you're in it. You have several options like different sizes, lots of different colors, markers for solid coloring, and of course crayons for that uneven crayon-colored look. And what a lot of kids will like is the fact that you'll always stay in the lines, as long as you don't lift the stylus after you select an area. Crayola Treasure Adventures does give you the coloring experience you'd expect with the use of the DS and stylus. But if you expected some creative surprises, then this game will be a bit disappointing. Still, for a young kid who still does like to color with crayons, this will probably be enjoyable. It's just not going to do much for anyone else.
-Fights with Fire, GameVortex Communications AKA Christin Deville
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