Borderline Unethical
The Good: This game is super fun and highly educational. The interface is beautiful. The way the game is designed is great for learning. It presents you with five historical “faces” and you have to guess which facts match which face. There are different rounds, each using the same faces, but a different set of facts. The result is that you are learning to associate a particular face with a location, time period, their notable deeds, and so forth, while also learning to distinguish them from other historical figures, and memorizing what their faces look like. As an educational game, this is one of the best I’ve seen. The game, itself, is well-done enough that I can’t give it one star despite is very terrible, borderline unethical business strategy. The Bad: It’s not free. At least, it is not a free “educational” game. To make this game educational, you’re going to end up spending a minimum of $5. Otherwise it is like a glorified toy. The reason for that is that they refuse to let you replay levels without spending money. Since no one ever learned history by once hearing a random fact and remembering it forever, that completely sabotages the entire point of the app - which is to educate people, not purely entertain them. The Ugly: It tries to trick you into paying coins. When you run out of “coins” and try to tap an answer while playing the game, a screen will pop up saying “Get more coins”. What this screen neglects to tell you is that you don’t HAVE to have coins to keep playing. You’re definitely going to want to make sure you have restrictions and passwords in place to stop your kids running up your credit card bill on this one. The game does a very bad job of explaining what the coins are and why you might want them. It leads you to believe that they’re somehow necessary to continue playing, because it literally interrupts your gameplay with a screen that says “buy more coins”. I actually left the game and came back later to see if my coins had replenished, just because I thought I couldn’t keep playing without spending money. Constructive Criticism: - Earning coins shouldn’t require you to get a streak of ten. - Rather than retract coins for wrong answers you should simply not reward coins when corrections had to be made - Consider making the coins have some other purpose as well that could be fun for kids. (Like buying power up buffs, or prizes from a prize shop) - Make a Lite version and a Paid version. Lite versions could allow people
