I knew I was in trouble the day Nate picked up my iPod Touch, clicked the button, swiped his little finger across the screen and promptly went into my music and deleted my playlists. And that was before his second birthday. He’s now quite the little pro at navigating through my Touch, although he must be closely monitored or things magically disappear. Jack, on the other hand, is a seasoned veteran with the Touch. I have downloaded many apps for his amusement, from building trains to games with his favorite characters to phonics practice. He loves them all!
I was so excited to try out a new app for Jack called Alien Buddies. Jack loves anything involving space, in fact his number one requested gift this Christmas was a Lego space shuttle. I knew he would love playing with little lovable aliens, and I was right. When we first started the game up, I thought I would have to show him how to play. You guessed it….I was wrong. He figured it out in seconds and was quickly playing by himself.
Alien Buddies has three different games and modes to suit different age groups. The games include matching, dot-to-dot puzzles, and sticker play. In the matching game, you have eight different options – color, shape, letter, and number recognition, in either an audio or visual format. For example, a great game for Jack was letter recognition, lower and upper case matching. A line of cute little aliens awaits pickup in a spaceship, but you have to match up the upper case and lower case of the same letter to get the alien into the correct spaceship.
Jack also enjoyed the dot-to-dot puzzles, which help with his number and pattern recognition. The sticker play was fun for him, as well. In fact, while browsing through my pictures, I found a bunch of his creations that he took screen shots of without me knowing.
In my opinion, this game is great for preschool to ages 6 or 7. The matching games are adorable (I love the little alien guys!) and really do help with recognition. Of course, the simple matching games, like color to color, were too easy for Jack. But, I found that Nate enjoys playing them with my help. The letter recognition is by far the best for Jack. He is still learning his lower case letters and easily confuses them. This game was a fun way to reinforce what he is learning in preschool and work on his alphabet.
I would recommend this app to any parent looking for a fun learning game for their young child. Jack gives it two thumbs up and thoroughly enjoys it!
Buy IT: You can learn more about Alien Buddies here or get it for yourself here at the iTunes app store for $0.99, which is a great deal for such a cute game!
~ Kelly
* We did not receive monetary compensation for this review. That’s IT Mommy received Alien Buddies free of charge to facilitate this review.The review is in our own words and is our opinion. Your results and opinions may differ.
