Didi & Ditto First Grade: The Wolf King

Didi and Ditto have advanced from kindergarten to first grade in their second installment of the grade-based series from Kutoka. This time around, the wolves have taken over the kingdom and have made the beavers and their friends practically slaves. However, the wolf king’s weak spot is his pride in the superior intelligence of wolves, so Didi and Ditto challenge the wolves to a game of wits to see who is really smarter. If Didi and Ditto win, the wolves will have to leave the valley. If the wolves win, then either Didi or Ditto will become the wolf king’s personal slave.

There are 16 activities featured on this program, most of which are fairly well designed. These activities focus on critical thinking skills, various math skills, word and letter recognition, measurements and science facts. Some of the activities are: Which Turtle, a fun variation of Guess Who, where players have to guess which physical attributes the other player’s turtle has by asking “yes/no” questions; The King’s Dominoes, a matching/sequencing game using double-sided dominoes with pictures; A Fragrance for the King, a number recognition and counting game where players have to follow directions to move back and forth among numbered perfume bottles; The Dice Game, a version of a type of “shut the box” game, which demonstrates addition in a dice game of chance; and The Writing Machine, a game which requires kids to choose letters to spell out words in short sentences.

Many of these activities are engaging and creatively designed, like the really cute Singing Snails, an unusual version of a “match the note” musical activity, and The Cave Maze, an excellent critical thinking maze where the players have to move objects around to gain access to different areas, a game which is similar to a maze activity in The Zoombinis. However, other activities are badly designed, and suffer from a lack of clear direction. One example is The Writing Machine, a game that teaches sentence structure. The problem is that the interface for choosing letters is awkward, and also the directions are less than clear on the fact that a punctuation symbol is needed to end the sentence before the activity is considered complete. Another ill-designed game is Couki’s Wagon, a game of word relationships and rhymes. Kids have to click on a wagon to drop a word onto a matching cart below, but it is difficult to time the drop just right to hit the moving cart below, especially the ones two levels below. If a wrong word is dropped onto a cart, there is no way to remove it. Players will just have to wait for the time to run out to start the game over.

Also, even while the activities are fun and engaging, they’re not as good as they could be in terms of first-grade curriculum. Much more emphasis should be placed on phonics in the reading activities.

Because most of the 16 activities are very good, the few not-so-good ones don’t detract all that much from the overall quality of the game. However, this grade-based game has the worst interface I’ve ever seen in a kids’ game. The original Didi & Ditto Kindergarten also had some interface problems, but instead of the designers trying to improve the interface, they’ve made it much worse. As in Didi & Ditto’s Kindergarten, the activities are hidden in each scene for some unexplainable reason. A kid could spend quite a bit of time trying to find them. Even when found, it’s hard to remember where they are each time. The activities are accessible on the main menu screen after they’ve been completed, but as they’re not named, it’s still unclear how to access a particular activity.

Many of the activities require typing, which is hard for a lot of first-graders. The typing isn’t designed very well, as in the activities that require users to skip spaces in the letter blanks. Some of the activities will have words that have some letters in the word, but not all. When typing the missing letters, the user has to manually “skip over” the letter that’s already there, to be able to type in the next letter. This should have been automated. And, most games in this age group use the mouse to choose letters from a grid, which is easier.

Another smaller negative is the annoying voice acting in this game. All of the wolves sound like they’re mentally deficient, as they speak really slowly and choppily. Also, their voices are nasal and irritating. Didi and Ditto sound like they have really bad colds. The language is a bit odd, too. The cursor is called a “pointer”, and one activity has word phrases like “the mother” and “the grandfather”, which is not really how Americans would speak. They would say “your mother” or “his grandfather”.

It’s a shame that this game has these interface problems, as it has some good content. However, while the activities are good, getting to them is a big problem. Not only does the interface cause hardship, the long wait times for the spoken instructions can be a detriment for kids. The speech can be clicked through with the space bar, however, which I highly recommend. And, the activities aren’t as educational as they could be, so they don’t really compensate for the negatives.

I cannot recommend this game, especially when there are so many other first-grade software programs like Jumpstart and Reading Rabbit that do a much better job at keeping kids interested. It’s a shame, as Kutoka has many good programs that they’ve developed over the last several years, particularly the Mia series. I hope their next Didi & Ditto title is a big improvement over this one.

Gameplay: 5.0
It’s hard to have fun with this game, which is the point of playing a computer game. The difficult and awkward interface becomes the focus, instead of the activities. Kids won’t be learning much if they’re not playing.

Graphics: 8.0
The best feature of this game are the wonderful graphics. All of Kutoka’s games are visually appealing, and this one is no exception.

Sound: 5.0
The voices are so annoying, it’s hard to describe how bad they are.

Difficulty: Medium/Hard
Even the easy level is not all that easy for first-graders, and the higher levels are quite challenging. And, the interface makes everything much harder than it should be.

Concept: 7.0
The concept is good, with some innovative critical thinking and creative activities. However, the presentation and execution leaves much to be desired overall.

Overall: 6.0
This was a hard game to rate on a scale, as the good and bad points were so extreme from each other. There were some good activities, and some bad ones. The interface was poorly designed, but the game was pretty. The voices were atrocious, but the clickable hotspots were very cute. However, the game as a whole isn’t one that I can recommend to parents, who have many other better games they can acquire for their first-graders.