Parents' Guide to Neopets: Legends & Letters

While this franchise was once big among tween girls, this release sadly illustrates the company's disconnect from its current audience. Neopets: Legends & Letters' first mistake is ignoring the uninitiated. People who weren't playing Neopets back in the day don't know the characters, their world, or their backstory, and the app doesn't do much to bring them up to speed. There's a brief mention of a bad guy named the Claymaker who's threatening the Neopets world. As a result, you're thrown in with some guy called Krawk and headed into battle with him. This raises the app's second mistake: not building on its core gameplay. Neopets is all about taking care of pets, and there's little of that here. While you can replenish your pets' battle energy with food and put clothes on them, the main idea is playing a Scrabble-like word game against the AI. This could work: match-3 apps succeed in adding combat by adding cool effects, power-ups, and changing board formations. Neopets attempts something similar but doesn't go beyond simple word formation and basic attacks, and over time things get monotonous. This gets even more pronounced when the difficulty rises, preventing you from progressing until your Neopets get significantly stronger.

When that happens, you have two options: spend hours replaying the same repetitive battles, or break down and buy the items you need. Neither is all that appealing, and the app's lackluster storyline and thin social networking aspect don't help matters much. You'd never know the app came from a franchise built on passionate fan community; the in-app friend list isn't good for anything, since you can't play with friends, and the app doesn't connect to your existing Neopets account, which is baffling. Done right, Neopets: Legends & Letters might well have slowed the decline of a once popular interactive fad; as it is, the mediocrity of the app is more likely to hasten it.