American Girl is a popular line of toy dolls, and now you can read about their adventures with the new free-to-play American Girl World app.  It’s available on iOS and Android devices, but reviewed on iPad here.  The app takes the form of an interactive story book, with each book on the app featuring one of four characters.  The first character you can read about, Z. Yang, is an aspiring filmmaker.  But when she wins a film contest audition, can she juggle that, her school projects, and dealing with her friends?  After that you can read about the next friend with a bunch of in-game coins, and the last two stories cost real money.

In the game you’ll mostly read text and dialogue, but sometimes you must tap on the screen to perform certain actions and make choices.  I’m not sure if the choices you make greatly affect the story, but it certainly provides plenty of replay value, and the stories are pretty long, too.  When you do these actions and choices, it’ll take off ‘energy.’  When you are out of ‘energy,’ you must wait a while for it to fill up again, or you can buy more.  When you tap on things on the screen, you may get coins, more energy, or level up icons.

When you level up, you’ll receive gifts like even more coins and energy.  You’ll mostly spend coins on outfits for your characters, which you can dress them up in to customize their look in the story.  Really the only main problem I had was the lack of instructions on certain interactive spots, like it took me a while to figure out you had to slide notes onto a cell phone, for instance.  While I think American Girl fans may dig this app, if it were up to me, I’d rather just buy them a American Girl doll or real book or something.

Kid Factor:

Nothing violent or objectionable here.  Reading skill is a must for the text, and parental supervision is recommended for the in-game ads and purchases.

Tags: Game Reviews