Dinner won’t be ready for an hour and your 2.5 year old daughter wants to watch that same episode of Dora for (what seems like) the 200th time…Bruce the Moose to the the rescue.
Bruce is an adorable kiddie Moose that loves to play Hide and Seek, and it’s your job to find him. Gameplay consists of simply touching objects on the screen to see if Bruce is hiding behind them. You scroll the screen back and forth with your finger, looking for Bruce’s cute little antlers peeking out from whatever object he is hiding behind. When you think you’ve found him, you tap the object he is hiding behind and he’ll pop out, blow a little kiss, do a little dance, wave bye bye and hide again. Lather, rinse, repeat… When you touch an object which Bruce is not hiding behind, it makes a little noise, giggles, wiggles or flips. There is a gameplay video on the official Facebook page for the game.
Find Bruce (NiceGuys) is simple, repetitive, and very cute, or in other words, all the right elements for a game for little kids. It was specifically designed with little kids in mind. The graphics are very, very, very cute bright and colorful. The in-game music consists of a short little ditty that plays over and over again while Bruce is hiding. The song does get repetitive, but eventually you’ll just find your self tuning it out.
My daughter’s first play session of Find Bruce was a 45 minute marathon of squeals of joy and many, many instances of falling over with laughter. I should also note that there were far too many utterings of “He kissed me Daddy…Bruce kissed me” than a Dad is ready to hear from his 2.5 year old daughter. 😉 Every time she found Bruce, it was like she was finding him again for the first time, and she would immediatley say, “Let’s find him again!”.
If it were not for me having her try another game after 45 minutes of nothing but finding Bruce, I think Emily would have happily played the game for over an hour. The other games didn’t stand a chance against the cute hiding moose, and we quickly returned Find Bruce.
The sheer joy and excitement that Find Bruce brings to my daughter is well woth putting up with the extreme repetitiveness of the game. I have no idea how long it’s appeal will last, but she has requested “Bruce” on multiple occasions since the initial time we played. I should also note that this was the first time that I actually allowed my daughter to touch my beloved iPod, so I was a bit afraid it might become a projectile and supervised her while she played, but I think it would have been equally as captivating for her had I not been sitting with her.
My only real complaints with the game was that sometimes when my daughter would try to touch the screen to “successfully” find Bruce, the screen would scroll a bit, carrying Bruce off the screen. This was usually when Bruce was hiding behind an object right near the edge of the iPod screen. As this was my daughter’s first experience with the iPod, it’s quite possible this was due to pilot error. The other complaint is that sometimes Bruce would hide behind an object in the background, which was directly behind a different object in the foreground, making it a bit difficult to tap the actual object that Bruce was hiding behind.
As far as improvement suggestions go…perhaps NiceGuys could add some of Bruce’s equally as cute friends into the game and offer a few different locations. It’d also be nice to have separate music and sound effect volume controls, since some of the sound effects were a little soft even on max volume. Finally, an accelerometer option for scrolling might be nice for little ones who haven’t quite mastered dragging.
If you have a young child that loves cute pictures, and enjoys playing hide and seek over and over and over again, then this is a definite pickup for just $0.99! As all kid’s are different, your mileage may vary, but our house is crazy for Bruce the Moose!
