iMommy: Review - Smart Apps For Kids

 

 

Bottom line: lets your little one “play mom,” taking care of the baby by finding things that upset him or make him happy. Will probably appeal most to kids ages 3-6. Free lite version available.  

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If you’re as old as I am, you may have spent two weeks in high school caring for an egg. Remember that assignment? The home economics teacher gave everyone an egg and told us to carry it around for two weeks, caring for it as if it were a baby.

Or maybe you once owned a Tamagochi, those little electronic pets on a keychain that were so popular a few years back. The thing beeped at you when it was time for the pet to be fed, or go to bed, or potty, or take a walk.

iMommy, by K&N Ventures, is sort of the modern-day version of a Tamagochi, or the home ec teacher’s egg. The user is responsible for a virtual baby, and spends the game caring for it, i.e., feeding, changing, and bathing it, and determining ways to make it more content.

Users can choose the gender, hair color, and eye color for their baby. The user can also choose from four ethnicities, which I thought was a nice touch, since many games are much more limited in this respect. The user can then choose clothes for the baby before starting off to play the game, which involves nine different “rooms” where baby-care takes place. A coloring page is also available.

I was assisted in this review by my preschool princess, who is three-and-a-half years old. We were using the full iMommy version ($1.99), but a free lite version is also available.

For younger children, this app could serve as a good introduction to caring for something. Certain things in each scene make the baby happy or sad, and the player must determine what is necessary to please the baby. If your kid is asking for a puppy, or even a goldfish, maybe he should start with iMommy.

This app entertained my princess for a reasonable period of time on the first play, and she has come back to it on her own several times and played it for short periods.  I imagine that she will continue to revisit it off and on when the mood strikes.

The multiple levels gave enough activity that she didn’t grow bored as quickly as she might have. She enjoyed taking the baby to the beach, going on a picnic, giving the baby a bath, etc. And with my princess, a coloring page is always a winner.

The sound effects (i.e., the baby laughing and crying) are realistic enough that while we were playing this in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, the hygienist stuck her head out to see who had a baby with them.

On the down side, I personally found the graphics to be a little elementary. I will say, however, that this did not bother my daughter at all. I also think that the tasks would quite quickly bore anyone other than someone at the preschool level.

There were several instances where the mechanics were tedious.  If my little one did not get an object to the exact position where the app expected it to be, the object would pop back to its original position.  It was frustrating to her, for example, when she had to “hand” the bottle to the baby multiple times before the baby would take it.

As I already said, for my daughter a coloring page is always a winner.  She loves them. I would have been more satisfied with these if they had been in keeping with the theme, but they were just random coloring pages. I think coloring pages related to babies would have been much more entertaining and have made a lot more sense.

There were some minor details I could have done without.  I found the “oops” button on the diaper changing page unnecessary to the point of being rude. And in one scene the thing that makes the baby cry is a spider landing on its head . . . what on earth is that about?

The App Store says this app is “fun for all ages.” I found that it entertained my pre-schooler, but my seven-year-old pretty much only found interest in making fun of it.

While I may have personally found iMommy to be a little tedious, the thing is that it’s not meant for me.  My little one was entertained enough that she has revisited it multiple times in the week since we installed it. So, at least for now, it’s staying on our iPad.

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Kelli is wondering if the sun is ever going to make a reappearance. Somebody needs to remind her of this when she is complaining about August in Alabama. K&N Ventures is an advertiser with SmartAppsForKids.com.

 

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source: www.smartappsforkids.com