Eric & Bruce Magic Restaurant

This creative cooking experience has some major flaws, including crashes, a lack of tutorial/introduction, and actions that don't behave as expected. Eric & Bruce Magical Restaurant is an idea that will appeal to a lot of kids. Mixing up a potion to see what it does is fun. But the execution doesn't match up to the promise. The app refused to load on install, but started after a reboot of the device. It worked for awhile, but then stopped again. This required a clean install and another reboot. Once running, there's not much guidance on what to do. Most kids will figure out the basics, but some sort of intro story or video would tie the experience together. The recipes have some cute effects such as turning the characters into animals, giving them a costume (vampire, ninja, bearded lady) or making them invisible. Sometimes a potion disagrees with a character, giving them gas. Other times, the characters appear to be drunk. The three characters (except the cat) show no ethnic diversity, but one of the potions turns their skin brown and gives them primitive clothing (i.e. a grass/leaf skirt, tooth necklace, etc.). There is a scroll with recipes so kids can recreate their favorite potions, but not all potions work on all characters. And it seems that sometimes potions just don't work at all. This is confusing as it's hard to know if kids picked an incorrect ingredient, the wrong character, or it was a random glitch. We never did figure out how to unlock the fourth character and two of the buttons on the main screen (other apps and rating) are disabled. This would be an OK experience without the loading problems, but you'll likely want to pass unless it's updated for stability.