Common Sense Media Review
By Christopher Healy
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
Cute but wordy preschool game has lots of activities.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 3+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Play
Videos and Photos
Bubble Guppies
What's It About?
The BUBBLE GUPPIES are mer-people who, in this story, team up to build a racetrack for their car (don't ask why they drive cars underwater or how they operate the pedals without feet). They collect parts of the track by first helping out at a farm and then exploring a busy city, each area presenting them with matching, searching, and trivia challenges.
Is It Any Good?
The best thing about the Bubble Guppies game is its variety. There are plenty of activities, all of which are very different from one another, including planting seeds, directing traffic, building a car, matching silhouettes, and more. And each of these activities has a nice educational lesson to it; the only one that really doesn't is the car racing at the end. The one big flaw in the game is the way it makes you wait through verbal instructions before performing any actions. This may not only rile up impatient kids, but it prevents them from acting on their own once they've gotten the grasp of a mini-game's rules.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about whether kids want to play this game because they have seen the TV show. How does this game serve to market the TV show?
Parents can also talk to kids about the difference between video game cars and real ones -- particularly how hitting something with your car in real life would be harmful (unlike in the game, where cars simply come to a stop when they encounter an obstacle).
Game Details
- Platform : Nintendo DS
- Subjects : Math : patterns , shapes
- Skills : Creativity : imagination , making new creations , Thinking & Reasoning : investigation , thinking critically
- Pricing structure :
- Available online? : Not available online
- Publisher : 2K Play
- Release date : November 9, 2012
- Genre : Preschool
- Topics : Transportation ( Cars & Trucks ) , Animals
- ESRB rating :
- Last updated : October 1, 2025
Did we miss something on diversity?
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