Preview

Vamonos! Let's go with Dora on her latest adventure helping her friends, the Explorer Stars. Each of the Explorer Stars is in trouble, and it's up to Dora (with our help, of course!) to rescue them. And, Dora will be collecting lots and lots of stars along the way, to put in Backpack.

There are six Explorer Stars, each representing a different adventure, with three games in each adventure. The first game is always a find-and-seek game for stars, with each star location shown briefly before the search. The other games consist of several mazes, a musical note matching game, a "match the object to the correct person" game, a shape/pattern activity, a shape-matching game, a couple of simple platform games, and two racing games.

The six adventures are reached by choosing the corresponding Explorer Star on the main menu. Once chosen, the adventure can't be de-selected, but must be played in totality before players can return to the main menu. This is annoying. Each adventure begins with a short introduction to the adventure, that relies on pictures to explain the adventure, rather than words, as the target audience is pre-reading. These short sequences can be clicked through.

There is no save game feature, and the game is begun fresh each time it is turned on. Also, there is no saved progress for the games while still playing. Once finished, each adventure is begun anew if chosen again.

As this is a game for the extremely young, each activity and game is simply designed. The stars' location is pointed out each time, and if players forget, they will pop back up in view, then hide again. These star searches are really too easy to be a whole lot of fun after the first few plays, as each star location is clearly marked. Different difficulty levels here would have been helpful. The mazes are also easy, as are the racing and platform games. At the same time, they are also engaging and fun to play, which is a tribute to the designers, as it is hard to keep a game easy enough for a three-year-old to play, but interesting enough to engage a five-year-old.

The musical note-matching activity is handled nicely, and features several well-known children's songs such as Old McDonald and Mary had a Little Lamb, among others, and is randomized. The shape/pattern game is also well-done and fun to play, with a cute train that rides over the shapes. The shape-matching game and another matching game where objects are matched with the correct person, while fun the first time around, do not appear to be randomized (from the several times we played them), so are the same each game. The shape-matching game is similar to a jigsaw puzzle, and could have had at least a few more different puzzles, and the object/person matching game could have had different objects assigned to different characters each time; this would have enhanced the gameplay significantly.

Who doesn't love Dora the Explorer? Young fans will have a good time interacting with Dora's friends in this fun and non-frustrating game designed for the youngest gamers. Success is guaranteed, there are no losers in Dora's world! The games are good for the most part, and offer a nice amount of variety. While some of the games could have been better designed, several are exceptionally well-done, especially when considering that the developers had to design this product for kids ages 3-6, which is a much wider age range in terms of abilities than for kids ages 6-10. The only slight negative is the inability to access the main menu from the adventures, which means that kids will have to turn the game off and then back on, to escape from the middle of an adventure.

A great choice for parents looking for a handheld game for their very young children, to play on their siblings' handheld.

Gameplay: 7.5
There are lots of mini-games, and while many are similar, there are also many that are different. The activity games are fun and creatively designed, considering that simplicity was a key issue, but some that should have been randomized were not. The racing games are quite fun.

Graphics: 8
The graphics are vibrant and colorful, and are reminiscent of Dora's world.

Sound: 7
The music is good, but gets repetitive.

Difficulty: Easy
These games are very easy.

Concept: 7
While many of these mini-games have been done before, the presentation here is good. Also, there aren't that many handheld games for kids quite this young, and this is definitely one of the better ones.

Multiplayer: N/A

Overall: 7.5
Overall, this is a good preschool handheld game. Parents will want to look at this one if they have younger kids who've been wanting to play a GBA game.