My Friend Peppa Pig – a review, sort of
My 6yo has never really played with the Nintendo Switch. Part of this has to do with understanding touch screens better, and part of this has to do with my Switch game collection being not particularly kid friendly (looking at you Bendy and the Ink Machine.) My Friend Peppa was offered to us for review last month and that changed things.
Update: something is really wrong with this (see below)
I’m not going to review the merits of Peppa’s adventures here, but I will say that a kiddo who used to love Peppa but is now too big for her, played until we took the Switch away. There was no argument either, she was Peppad out.
While that probably reads like zombie child playing a video game, her attention on most Android/iPad games is short. I get notifications of switching apps every 10 or so minutes generally as she’s not enthralled with most things. This was interesting as the only other game I’ve ever seen her as invested in was a really cheesy Ghostbusters game that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the original Ghostbusters but was released near the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it.
My Friend Peppa Pig is no Call of Duty: Black Ops. It’s not technically impressive, doesn’t have a lot of horsepower requirements for the gaming system, and will or will not enthrall your child. All going to come down to them.
It’s well done, fits perfectly into the Piggyverse, and does not appear to require parental intervention beyond, in my case, getting it started.
It’s a game at $20 or so I’d pick up and have no regrets. You can find this price sometimes, but coming in at an MSRP of $38.50 and the best price I can spot being $32.70 on the Switch, it’s a bit on the Daddy Piggy side. It’s less expensive on the XBOX and Playstation, but still in the $30 range.
It’s not something that’s going to challenge an older child, and to me it feels a little bit like a talking sticker set, but it’s pretty cool to see my kid invested for more than 10 minutes in something.
Updated March, 2022
So after a while I’ve managed to notice that the audio is never in sync on the Switch version, the game is taking forever to load causing my youngest to think it’s broken, the character creation limit at 3 means you have to erase one of your characters to create a new one which evidently causes great distress. Thing needs some work.
