Parent's Guide: Sugar, Spice and Not So Nice - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

'Sugar, Spice and Not So Nice' is a new, confectionery-themed land for the Xbox Live Arcade hit 'A World of Keflings'. Much like the previous entries in the series, the expansion sees your child playing as a giant version of their Xbox Live Avatar, in order to help a load of little people, known as Keflings rebuild their kingdom, by harvesting materials, assembling buildings and in this case, defeating the evil Wizard Waldorf and his gluttonous nephew Augustus. Having usurped Charlie the Unicorn as ruler of Candy Peak, stolen the Everlasting Gloplopper and wiped Charlie's memory in the process, it's up to your avatar and a whole cast of bonkers characters to help put things right again.

At it's core, Keflings is a game about resource management - you'll need to think set your Keflings to harvesting your core materials of sugar, caramel and chocolate, often ferrying supplies between different buildings, to ensure you don't run out of a key component. Your avatar could do all the work itself, but the idea is that you delegate tasks out to your little Kefling friends, getting them to cut sugar from candy floss trees or scoop chocolate out of the volcano instead, before dropping them off at the relevant buildings, which frees you up to keep building. The materials you gather are used to construct components of new buildings, which, when you place them in the order shown on the relevant blueprint, causes a new building to magically appear on that spot. It's a lot simpler to get the hang of in practice than it sounds, with a funny story and great characters tying everything together. Things are made that little bit simpler thanks to the ability to press the left trigger to get an easy reminder of your objective, should it slip your mind.

In fact, the single stumbling block children may have is that Keflings does require a pretty confident reader to play it - the story is told through a series of speech bubbles with no voice overs, and often with made up words thrown in (e.g. splendiferous, amnesiacorn), which may mean children struggle knowing what to do or where to go next if they just skip everything. If they've coped with the Keflings games before, though, there's no extra requirement here, and children especially will most likely approve of the colourful cast of characters and humour ("Your face is rotund"). Thankfully, the game's nowhere near as girly as it looks, either, as although everything's pink and brightly coloured, the story, characters, and humour should appeal to both boys and girls equally.

What may prove useful, particularly for poorer readers and younger children, is the two player, same console co-operative mode, where two people can help out in the Kefling kingdom together - with a helpful parent reading the trickier text back to the child, and overseeing the gathering of resources, this is a great game for parent and child to play together.

'Sugar, Spice and Not So Nice', much like the rest of 'A World of Keflings' has nothing questionable in the slightest - it's all about helping a bunch of tiny people rebuild their kingdom. The only 'violent' aspect is that you can boot the little people around, sending them flying across the map, but they just get straight up again and stroll back for more.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360