Review: Camping Mama: Outdoor Adventures

Details

Parent Category: Gadgets

Category: Video Games

Published on Wednesday, 05 October 2011 15:00

Written by Christopher Lai

Camping Mama: Outdoor Adventures for the Nintendo DS is a where Mama shows off her wilderness skills featuring 100 different stylus mini games set in an outdoor adventure theme. Throughout 38 levels, your character will have to complete different tasks for Camping Mama and Papa while unlocking the different mini games.

Camping Mama is setup similar to a top-down adventure game where you control a boy or girl character through each environment avoiding obstacles along the way such as bushes, trees and furry companions. These lovable creatures, depending on the motif of the level, range from all kinds of creatures like bears and monkeys.

As your adventurer wanders the different environments, he will encounter different touch screen mini games, of which most are classic puzzles games including matching, timing, and normal puzzle games. The majority of the advertised 100 mini games play similarly to one another with only slight environment changes differing between them. With the exception of the environments, each level plays like the last creating a repetitive gaming experience.

The game is easy. Every mini game can easily be completed to a 100% perfect rating with only a few being difficult enough to warrant a 90% completion. You would expect these mini games to be riveting since they are the heart of the franchise.

The health meter contains 8 hearts, but does it rarely ever come into play due to the fact health is given away like candy. Hearts can easily be found throughout the map as well as completing mini games successfully.

Collecting isn't very difficult either because each level is small enough to walk through every inch. There are no hidden passages or treasures to find and if one were to write a walkthrough, it would be a dry piece of literature.

With such a high standard set forth by its predecessor Cooking Mama, Camping Mama falls short of the mark. The mini games aren't unique with the DS Touchscreen only being used in a mundane manner with very little creative utilization. This title may be well suited for the younger gaming audience, but if you're looking for an expansion to the Cooking Mama experience, this isn't the game for you.

Camping Mama falls two graham crackers short of a full S'more.

Score 2/4

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