Hooked Gamers Junior Review - The Smurfs

When I was much younger, The Smurfs were the Pokemon of the era. Collecting all the small figurines from the local store was cool. But the phenomenon that was the little blue creatures three apples tall created by Peyo soon died off, overtaken by the next craze (possibly something developed by Erno Rubik). That was until recently when trailers for the Smurfs live action movie appeared. The Smurfs are again back on the scene, and kids everywhere are going Smurf-crazy.
And of course, with every kids movie comes the obligatory video game. And with kids of my own, it was always going to be a must have title with the school holidays approaching. So after handing over The Smurfs game to Hooked Gamers’ own Junior Reviewer, Emily she immediately slotted the game into her pink DS. And after some time spent with the game she gives her thoughts on the game featuring the cute blue characters known as Smurfs.

The Smurfs game is a lot of fun to play. The game has three sections. The first is where there are six mini games. The first one is cake decorating where you choose the cake and then you can decorate the cake any way you want. You can put all different kinds of fruit and candles. The next game is a colouring-in game. You chose a picture of a Smurf and then use the stylus to pick which colour you want to paint with and then touch the part of the picture you want to colour in. Another game is a ‘Match the Smurf’ game. One screen has Papa Smurf and he has a speech bubble on top of his head. On the other screen are all the Smurfs and you have to touch the Smurf that Papa Smurf is saying.





The next game is a game where you dress up Smurfette. All you need to do is touch each part of the outfit that you want to put on her and it will magically go onto Smurfette. It is very easy, like dressing a paper doll. Another game is a jumping game. You have to touch the screen next to the Smurf and he will jump. If you slide the stylus quickly when the Smurf is in the air, he will jump higher. If you jump to the top, you can get gold apples as well as the silver and red apples you can get when you don’t jump as high. The more you get, the bigger your score will be. The last game is a music game. You need to touch the right musical instrument in time with the music as they scroll down the screen. On the harder level, you have to remember which instrument to press, but on the easy level you don’t need to remember.





For each game, you get a score. Three flowers is the best score, but two is good as well. You can still get one flower for a small score. Then there is a Smurf in a barrel game where you have to find the Smurf after the barrels are shuffled around. If you get the right barrel you get a different Smurf for your collection. The Smurf collection is another section of the game. You can look at all the Smurfs you have collected. I think there are nineteen and I got them all. You can arrange them how you like and can zoom in to look at them closely. The other section of the game is the picture-book mode. It tells the story of the Smurfs.





The Smurfs game is just so cute to look at. I especially like Smurfette. The game is colourful and everything is nice and bright and it is easy to see everything on the screen. The sounds of the game are smooth , nice and not too loud. You could say it was ‘smurfie’. There are three levels of each game. The Easy level was easy for me, but the medium level was a bit harder, especially the music game. I really enjoyed the game and collecting the Smurfs and getting high scores is fun. It was Smurftastic. I give it 9 out of 10.

The Smurfs is definitely a game aimed at a younger audience. With the game being held sideways akin to the Brain Training series, the mini-games and their controls are simplistic, so that even the youngest of gamers can play without too many problems – even Emily’s four year old sibling had little trouble on the Easy level. The mini games do not have too much lasting appeal for adults, but it will keep the younger audience quiet during their school holidays, which is always a good thing.
So if you’ve got some ankle-biters running around who are singing the happy Smurfs tune, The Smurfs DS game could be a worthy purchase.