Parent's Guide: Fifi And The Flowertots: Fifi's Garden Party - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Fifi's Garden Party for the DS is another entry in a long line of children's TV tie-in games, offering the standard fare of a variety of mini-games set in the world of the program. From familiar games like jigsaws, pairs and the like, to the more mathematically-based solving calculations, breaking numbers up into thousands, hundreds, tens and units (although you only have to worry about tens and units on the easiest difficulty), as well as arranging dominoes end to end. If some of those sound like they may be a tad on the complicated side for Fifi And The Flowertots' pre-school audience, then you'd be right - it's a bit sad really, and an all too common problem for the games-for-young-DS-owners market.

The game starts off okay, with you being told how Fifi's forgotten about the garden party she had planned, and now the ever-helpful Bumble has reminded her, she has to make a mad dash round the garden collecting stuff for the party - except your average three to five year old will likely get none of this, as it's all told through reams and reams of text, while the theme tune loops in the background. Something as simple as voice overs would have fixed it, and made it much more playable for the little ones - instead, it's likely to just turn into a lot of frustrated, manic tapping as they skip over it all, impatient to get into the game. Or worse still, they may just get fed up and turn it off before they even reach the games.

Unfortunately, this slightly-too-complicated-for-the-target-audience theme continues with the mini-games too - although there's a choice of three different difficulties to play on, the easy mode still doesn't seem quite easy enough, particularly on the more maths-based mini-games, which make up roughly half of the games on offer here. Children of Fifi And The Flowertots age are likely to just be learning to count and doing a few simple sums - so while asking them to make 26 on an abacus may not be too bad, asking them to solve equations like ? + 9 = 15 is probably too tricky, especially if they've never come across anything like them before.

The problem with Fifi And The Flowertots: Fifi's Garden Party is mostly one of them aiming too high - the mini-games involve things more suited to a six or seven year old at least, whereas the TV show is aimed at kids several years younger. By the time they're able to tackle what the game throws at them, they may have grown out of Fifi, and would likely dismiss the game as too 'babyish' (as our test seven year old did, even though she could do the puzzles), while our test three year old, who watches the program, was left stumped. That's not to say the game isn't worth your time though - if your starting-school-age child still loves Fifi, then this game will likely prove more challenging than Peppa Pig and co, but shouldn't be too hard for them on the easier difficulties. Just exercise some caution.

Fifi And The Flowertots: Fifi's Garden Party based on children's the TV show of the same name, and as such, contains no questionable content at all - there's no violence, swearing, guns, or gore at all.

Fifi And The Flowertots is an entirely single player game, so there's no multiplayer modes to speak of.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo DS