While we've written before about how much we like the whole Wonderbook concept - and how much better it seems to work than Kinect while using much less space - developers as a whole seem to have been fairly slow to get to grips with it. A year into its existence with only four games under its belt, it's something of a shame that more teams haven't put their weight behind the interactive pop-up book idea. Even the disastrous uDraw notched up more titles before it unceremoniously sank below the surface.
Perhaps at least one of the reasons for the slow take-up is that the Wonderbook idea doesn't really lend itself all that well to that many types of games - a shooter could never use Wonderbook, for example - but an educational one definitely can. Step up Wonderbook: Walking with Dinosaurs, the fourth Wonderbook game, and a partnership between Sony and the BBC to bring the gigantic prehistoric monsters to a Playstation 3 near you. Oh, and the dinosaurs are coming too.
Jurassic!
With a copy of the game in hand, all you'll need is a Playstation Eye camera, a Playstation Move controller, and a Wonderbook itself to get going. Available in either a bundle with just the Wonderbook, or as a starter pack that includes the Playstation Eye, Move, Wonderbook and the game itself, there's an option for everyone to get involved with a minimum of duplicated equipment - with the game on its own available at the budget price of around £20.
The idea here is to mix a bit of education in with the virtual pop-up book fun. Opening the pages of the book, you'll move through a story that follows the stars of the Walking with Dinosaurs film - two young Pachyrhinosaursus, Juniper and Patchi - as they navigate the dangerous prehistoric world. In each chapter, you'll have a number of different activities to complete - whether it's searching a hidden object style scene in an attempt to spot the hidden dinosaurs, an x-ray section where a friendly dino comes and perches itself in front of you, ready for you to have a peak at its bone structure, or even going digging for bones yourself in a mini-excavation, as a load of rock pops up out of the Wonderbook itself, ready to be chipped away with your hammer.
And that's great - but the problem is Wonderbook: Walking with Dinosaurs seems to be more than a little bit on the awkward side, especially when you consider the young audience it's aimed at. It's especially odd, as up until now Wonderbook games have always been very much of a muchness, with a pretty standard format (and interface) they follow that had been proven to work. The problem is, Wonderbook: Walking with Dinosaurs has taken that, and replaced it with something that's so non-user-friendly, if you had to rely on it, you'd quickly go the way of the dinosaurs yourself.
X-ray specs sold separately
It's not exaggeration that we spent several minutes on the main menu trying to figure out how to get into the game. While on other games, you move a cursor around the screen to choose the options, here, inexplicably, there's nothing of the sort. You're expected to point the controller at the right option - but there's nothing telling you where you're pointing. It's the equivalent of pinning the tail on the donkey while blindfolded - you have literally no idea where you're going, or even what you're really meant to be doing. After all, with no pointer on screen, do you need to point the controller? Swish it to change option? Rotate it? Are you supposed to move the controller around until you can see it on the TV and then highlight the item? You have no clue - and it means your first ten minutes or so with Walking with Dinosaurs will involve less marvelling at prehistoric beasts and more navigating a prehistoric menu. It turns out - somewhat unbelievably - that the game wants you to hold your controller over the option you want to choose. Only it doesn't show you what it can see on screen - so you have no idea where the game thinks your controller is in relation to the option it wants. The mind boggles.
Luckily, from here-on in, things get a lot better. The excavation scenes in particular are very good -the way the Wonderbook opens up to lift some rock onto the surface looks like something out of a film, and will have children amazed - especially when their Move controller turns into a hammer that they can use to smash it up with. After pressing a button to switch to a brush and giving the newly uncovered bones a dust down, it's up to you to make use of some pincers to lift the bones up, and put them in place on a handy holographic dinosaur that pops up on screen. Luckily, your options are all highlighted, so there's not that much to guess, but it's still a pretty cool experience.
Less impressive are the hidden object type scenes. Giving you a 3D prehistoric scene on TV, it's up to you to have a look around using your Move controller to see if you can spot the dinosaurs it's given you in silhouetted form - only it's actually really quite hard. Some of the dinosaurs really aren't all that large (read: far away), so they're quite hard to spot, and there's no way to manually zoom in for a better look. Some dinosaurs can't be clicked on until the game tells you, either, which may be either confusing or frustrating to some children.
Sadly, the story gets a bit too "Walking with Dinosaurs" at times - one scene shows a herd of dinos crossing a river, only to repeatedly be picked off (and dragged underwater/drowned) by giant prehistoric crocodiles, which may be upsetting to some children, and - let's face it - isn't really all that much fun for adults either.
Other scenes see you exploring the undergrowth looking for certain types of plants, but again, the scene's so zoomed out, every plant looks pretty much the same, so you don't really know if you've found the one the game's asking for - all you know is the game put a giant glowing circle when you passed over the one spot. The other thing that really got on our nerves was the game's insistence on asking you to roar, or shout out to call someone. I don't know if you've noticed, but most children don't really need all that much encouragement to make noise - and when the game's asking them to shout, roar, or otherwise be incredibly noisy - and worse still, won't pick them up unless they're being incredibly noisy, it gets quite old quite fast - at least for any adult within a radius of five miles. The odd yell, fine. But six or seven times every chapter?
Every now and then, you'll be given a quiz about what you've learnt so far to check that you've been paying attention - or at least, usually. Some of the questions you're asked aren't actually recapping what you've already learnt, but ask you to use your initiative to answer a question like "Which of these animals has the loudest call", with options including a tiger and a whale (the answer being a Whale, apparently), which is a nice touch that'll keep children thinking.
In all, Wonderbook Walking with Dinosaurs is something of a mixed bag. It's a shame, because this is a game that greatly impressed us at a summer showcase event, but seemingly we only got chance to have a play with a few of the better modes. It's a long way from being rotten, and any young dinosaur fans will get some enjoyment out of this - but it could easily have been a lot better with a few tweaks to the interface, and a few more to the games.
Format Reviewed: Playstation 3
