School's Out

I'm a big kid at heart. I loved playgrounds when I was younger. Monkey bars? Brilliant. Swings? More fun than you can shake a stick at. Roundabouts? Better than any roller coaster. Games of “it” and hide and seek, football on concrete with a wet sponge ball and that age old favourite “how many girls' hair can you manage to pull before you got caught by the dinner ladies”. Now, I wasn't expecting “Schoolyard Simulator 2007”, but EA Playground doesn't do the experience justice.

EA Playground attempts to duplicate the playground experience with a series of mini-games such as Bug Hunt, Hopscotch and Dodgeball but unfortunately the collection isn't that inspiring and will quickly try the patience of the very kids it's aimed at and not just big kids such as myself.

The single player mode unleashes you on the schoolyard ruled by the Sticker King, an all powerful monarch and disher-out of sticker power ups. Here you can trade the marbles you get from winning games for stickers, which then increase your abilities in the mini-games.

The main heart of the game is centred on the kids you find scattered throughout the playground, each who excel at a particular type of playground sport. Beating them earns you a sticker which enables you to play the game in the quick play mode and some marbles which you can trade in like cold hard cash to the Sticker King for his wares. None of the kids have their own personalities and that only reason to talk to them is to play their game which is frustrating because they're not all in the same place; you have to look for them.

Being that there are only nine mini-games to choose from and each of them comes in the three classic difficulties of easy, medium and hard, EA Playground gets rather boring rather quickly, especially considering that the games never increase in complexity as the difficulty level goes up. Once you played a game a few times, that's all you're really going to get out of it. Some of the games are quite fun; RC Racers (a micro-machines like racer) and dodgeball are definitely the highlights, but the simplicity and repetitiveness of these games never makes you want to play them for more than a few minutes.