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Mazes are brilliant learning tools: they help us analyze situations, make mistakes and ultimately find our way to a conclusion. Maze Adventures by HB Studios conjures up countless mazes at different levels of difficulty that will keep your child entertained for hours.
Fundamentally, Maze Adventures is a very simple app. You select from a range of six themes (Princess, Robot, Knight, Fairy, Squirrel and Mouse) then choose a difficulty level from beginner to hard. The app then generates a maze for you to solve complete with treasures to collect along the way and, when appropriate to the difficulty level, obstacles to pass. There are two types of obstacles, locked doors and monsters, and both can be passed easily with the appropriate tools – keys and weapons – which you will have to search for first. The monsters and their respective weapons are themed to the maze and character you originally selected; the princess fights ogres with a magic wand, the mouse battles cats using a block of hard cheese on top of a stick and the knight faces dragons with a sword. As you progress through the maze, paths you have already traversed once are marked.
The age recommendation for the app is from age two according to the design studio (the App Store lists it for age four plus), so I sat down with my three-year-old to show him the new game. He started, as per my instructions on the beginner level, and had mastered moving his character through the maze within seconds; in fact within 10 minutes he had already progressed through beginner and easy levels and was begging me to let him try the “hard” setting which I did, curious to know how he would fare against it. Monsters and doors are introduced from the “easy” level onwards so I had already explained to my son what he needed to find; I left him to it and within minutes he was solving the “medium” and “hard” mazes mostly by himself.
His biggest falling point at the beginning was that the monsters scared him. However, this is because the in-game dialogue uses the word “monster” and the concept scares him, rather than the monsters in the game itself actually being scary. I could tell because my cat-loving son was also acting afraid of the “monsters” that were actually cartoon cats.
From an adult perspective, Maze Adventures has its good and bad points, one of the worst being the deeply irritating music that plays constantly during the game if you can’t persuade your child to have the sound switched off. You may also find yourself participating with this game much more than with other apps, especially if you have a child like mine who is determined to play at the hardest level no matter what, so if you’re looking for a game that will allow you some peace and quiet then there might be better options out there.
However for older children in particular, the infinite* number of maze possibilities means that they will always be able to do a new puzzle and if they get stuck and don’t touch the screen for a few moments, a helpful arrow appears that suggests the best direction in which to move. A demo is available for free on the Maze Adventures website for you to have a go if you're unsure about whether or not your child will enjoy it.
I find myself torn by Maze Adventures. On the one hand I don’t much care for the graphics or overall style and feel of the app (not to mention the music), however there is nothing actually bad about it. My son is fairly neutral about the game; he has not been drawn to playing it constantly as he has with several other apps we have reviewed together, but I will occasionally find him playing when he’s bored of his current favorite. If your child enjoys mazes and other similar puzzles then this will naturally be the ultimate game for them, and no doubt the process of working their way through the mazes will benefit any child who plays (all geek kids need to start their dungeon quests somewhere, right?). But it is clearly a one-trick pony. Whether or not it’s worth the cost is really down to you.
*Presumably the number of mazes available is not actually infinite as the game designers claim, but may as well be for all intents and purposes.
Maze Adventures is available for the iPad priced at $2.99/£1.99. A copy of the app was provided free for this review.
