PC

  News 
  Reviews
  Previews
  Hardware
  Interviews
  All Features

Areas

  3DS
  Android
  iPad
  iPhone
  Mac
  PC
  PlayStation 3
  PlayStation 4
  Switch
  Vita
  Wii U
  Xbox 360
  Xbox One
  Media
  Archives
  Search
  Contests

 

Kindergarten EDGE

Score: 95%
ESRB: Everyone
Publisher: Brighter Child Canada
Developer: Brighter Child Canada
Media: CD/10
Players: 1
Genre: Family/ Edutainment


Graphics & Sound:

Kindergarten EDGE brings together a wide selection of games and activities that will help prepare your young child or grandchild for their kindergarten year.

Characters like the ones from Land Before Time, Zoboomafoo and Caillou look, feel and sound just like the ones from their respective shows and movies. The in-game characters' likeness to their TV counterparts makes it that much easier for the kids to get into the activities and learn about math, science and reading without even realizing they are doing it.


Gameplay:

Kindergarten EDGE's 10 separate games use these well-known characters to help your kid with his/her number and letter recognition, spelling, reading, pattern recognition, sorting, counting as well as specific games about the sea and safaris. These discs contain 142 different activities to reinforce the information they have learned from school and other teaching activities.

Some of these games include the classical memory games, games that have you mixing and matching parts of animals to try to find all the pieces and put them together. Other games include putting various dinosaurs in the correct order.

Kindergarten comes with a small dry-erase board that lets your child practice letters and numbers, two decks of Land Before Time playing cards, one deck of numbers flash cards (like counting by tens, twos, evens, odds, etc.), and three activity books that do everything from connect the dots, to letters and phonics. With the help of these non-computer based activities, you can help your child learn and grow even when they are away from the wide variety of games that are available in Kindergarten EDGE.


Difficulty:

Kindergarten EDGE has a fairly steady difficulty level that doesn't really change all that much. In most cases, when you complete an activity, you have to repeat that task a few more times with a slightly more complex or faster scenario, but the games never get so out of hand that the child won't be able to get past it in a couple of tries. All in all, the difficulty of the package stays fairly constant across all of the games.

Game Mechanics:

Kindergarten EDGE uses a simple point-and-click system for all or most of its activities. This interface makes it easy for your child or grandchild to advance and learn without worrying about typing in complex keystrokes or typing while moving the mouse around like in other more adult games. But it's the combination of the games and non-computer activities that makes EDGE a great tool. The games each have their own pros and cons, but for the most part, each game's lesser aspects are compensated for by one of the other games.

The EDGE series' unique use of both computer games and activities will help your child learn, grow and prepare for kindergarten and is a must buy.


-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer

Minimum System Requirements:



Pentium II 300 MHz or equivalent, Windows 98/2000/Me/XP, 75 MB free hard drive space, 64 MB RAM, 16-bit DirectX compatible video card, 4MB memory, Windows compatible sound card, 800x600 16-bit display, 8x CD-ROM
 

Test System:



Windows XP Professional Ed., AMD Athlon XP 2400+ 2GHz, 2 GB RAM, DVD-RW, Radeon 9800 Pro, DirectX 9.0c

Windows Voyage Sony PlayStation 2 187 Ride or Die

 
Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated