Strawberry Shortcake: Sweet Dreams
Score: 70% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: The Game Factory Developer: The Game Factory Media: CD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure/ Platformer
Graphics & Sound: The graphics in Strawberry Shortcake: Sweet Dreams are pleasing to watch. I was expecting it to be so obnoxious that only a six year old girl wouldn’t get sick of it. Strawberry Shortcake is obviously geared for young girls, but the graphics and sound aren’t going to annoy other players. There’s also little things, like the dandelions poofing as if someone blew on them when you passed by them, that make it enjoyable to watch. The game music is quite pleasant, soothing, but not enough to put you to sleep. There’s also a trailer for the new Strawberry Shortcake movie that you can unlock to watch, once you have collected enough seeds.
Gameplay: Strawberry Shortcake: Sweet Dreams takes place in four different areas, with a different mode of “transportation” between each area. The game starts out in Strawberry Land at Strawberry Shortcake’s house. For each difficulty, a different one of her friends runs up and tells Strawberry that they can’t dream anymore. Strawberry tells them that there must be a problem with the dream factory but don’t worry, she’ll go fix it. The game teaches you to use the controls along the way. First you learn how to zap your enemies (crows and thorn bushes placed there by the Pie Man and Sour Grapes) with your dream wand to turn them into butterflies and berries. You also learn how to make a plant grow, so you can use it to jump off of. You also bounce off of heart-shaped launch pads to reach areas that you couldn’t get to otherwise. Eventually you reach the Dreamboat. You have to pilot the dreamboat through the sweets in the sky to get to the Land of Dreams. You travel through the Land of Dreams to find the Giant Butterfly who can fly you to the Dream Factory. Once inside the Dream Factory, you have to find the gears to fix the Dream Machine that the Pie Man broke. Inside here, you’ll learn how to fly like a butterfly and create berries to hold down buttons on the floor for you. After you fix the machine, you need to get home quickly, so you roam back through the factory to find the car to drive you out of the factory. Next, you travel back to the Dreamboat to fly you back to Strawberry Land. Once back there, you travel back to your house to tell your friend that they can dream again. Sound monotonous? It is. This game gets very boring within two hours. Maybe a huge fan of Strawberry Shortcake won’t get bored, but I doubt it. There are many ways they could have made it less boring. Throughout the game, you can collect presents to give to your friends. Instead of it just being a box, they could have made different kinds of gifts so the gameplay would at least change a little. Or, they could have had more recipes, songs, etc. available for harder difficulties. As it is though, given that each difficultly level is exactly the same as the level before, except with a few crows and bushes added, there’s just no replay value. And since it only take two hours to beat the game and unlock all the extras, I just can’t see any reason to play it more than once. Strawberry Shortcake: Sweet Dreams also has another area, the Fantasy Garden, that you can explore. Inside it, you can spend your seeds that you’ve collected. Available for purchase are each of Strawberry Shortcake’s friends, including Ginger Snap, Orange Blossom, Angel Cake, and new friends Raspberry Torte and Lemon Meringue, some recipes, a couple of songs, and a video trailer of the new Strawberry Shortcake Movie. Once you’ve purchased the friends, you can use them as your game character instead of Strawberry Shortcake. Each character has a different plant that grows for you to jump on and a different item that you create to drop on buttons. To view the recipes, listen to the songs, or watch the trailer, you go to the Bonus Area.
Difficulty: There is no possible way to die in this game. There is no health bar to watch, no healing, nothing that we expect from video games. When you get “hurt” by an enemy, you simply drop some of the seeds you have collected. But believe me, there’s plenty enough seeds to find. You can unlock everything you need seeds for in about an hour of playing. After that, you have absolutely nothing to do with your seeds, they just pile up. The only other way you can hurt yourself is to fall off the screen, in which case you’re just returned a very short ways back from where you fell off. Simple, no? Strawberry Shortcake does provide five different difficulties, but there’s no way to choose which difficulty you want to play. You simply beat one difficulty and go on to the next one. The only thing that they do to increase the difficulty between levels is add a few crows and thorn bushes.
Game Mechanics: At times, the controls in Strawberry Shortcake: Sweet Dreams are a real pain. I’m guessing the developers thought it would make it easier on kids if left was backwards and right was forwards and they didn’t have to worry about up or down, and that’s fine. At least until they have the path turn so you’re headed up or down. It’s only natural to want to press up to move up, but if you do so, you won’t move anywhere at all. Other than that, though, the controls are very simple. You use the analog stick to move, X is jump, and O calls your dream spells which you can cycle through with L1 and R1. Saving your game is only available between areas, which can be annoying since some levels take at least 20-30 minutes. To exit each area, including the Fantasy Garden and the Bonus Area, you hit Start and choose Quit. Although you think it'll quit your game, it just takes you back to the area selection screen. Overall, I’d recommend renting this game to make sure your kid isn’t going to get bored of it after one day.
-Cyn, GameVortex Communications AKA Sara Earl
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