Parent's Guide: Freakyforms Deluxe: Your Creations, Alive! - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

A game based around creativity, Freakyforms Deluxe tasks you with populating a planet with whatever weird and wonderful creatures you can conjure up with a series of simple shapes, limbs and accessories. With differently-themed regions of the planet, your child will need to make a wide range of creatures to conquer the challenges that lie ahead, whether it's flying through the skies of Cloud Land (which you'll need wings for), or swimming through the Ocean region - although there's not really any penalties for attempting each section with the 'wrong' designs, other than it makes it a bit harder to traverse.

Controlled with the Touch Screen (bar pressing A/L/R to interact with things), Freakyforms should be pretty easy to handle - perhaps the only thing that may pose a bit of a problem is the slingshot-style jumping. With a bit of trial and error, they should be able to work out how far and at what angle they need to pull the stylus back at to fling their Formee around, but it may be a bit of a stumbling block at first. As well as this, the level of reading involved may also pose a problem to younger children, as all the creatures talk exclusively in text, often telling you important things like what they want you to fetch or do for them.

But if they can get past the slightly awkward jumping mechanic and tackle the reading involved, Freakyforms isn't a particularly difficult game, and its quirky creative fun is likely to go down well with kids. Just be prepared to have to be shown every single one of their creations.

Freakyforms Deluxe has nothing questionable about it whatsoever - after all, it's a game that mostly centres around creating crazy creatures. We suppose if your children were so inclined, they probably could create a race of phallic monsters, and there's nothing really to stop them, but Freakyforms blocks the use of any dodgy names for creations - it wouldn't even let us have 'slapper' as the name for our many-handed creation. During the dungeon sections, your Formee creatures do get into battles, but there's no blood, gore, or anything nasty, and defeated opponents collapse in a heap on the floor while pulling a silly face instead.

While Freakyforms is mostly a single player game, it does have a multiplayer Download Play option, which sees one player setting a theme, which everyone then has to base a new character around.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo 3DS