Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

It’s grindy, it borrows very heavily from World of Warcraft without much of the gloss, it offers dual-classing, and it’s a stereotypical fantasy MMO game, but it’s free. Recently I’ve been playing the beta of Runes of Magic and after 11 XFire-counted hours I’m still enjoying it for the most part. I’m playing solo since I haven’t got too much time to play with others these days with the sudden interruptions of a two-month old at any time of the night, and I haven’t gotten too far away from the starter town, but the buzz so far is that the game is good.

When I say it borrows from World of Warcraft I’m not kidding. The animations and art style reminds me very heavily of that 800-pound gorilla without the polish and sophistication their superb animators can only apply. The sound work was uneven during the beta. Most spells my mage would cast made no sound at all. The networking is tricky for me to judge since I’ve been running it on a laptop dragging the 32-bit boat anchor also known as Vista, but I’m going to say they have a bit of work to do on lag. Add in a website that, when I registered, had some serious flaws. English isn’t their first language — something that has finally stopped being horribly obvious in the early in-game text — and the website had some inscrutable error messags when trying to do something as simple as give your online account a very strong password with special characters. this tells me the game itself may have some serious teething problems ahead of it.

Still, it’s free, and it launches live tomorrow. You can spend money to get some goodies, but the developers have said on Massively that they plan to make everything you can buy also available for free in-game if you can put in the time. So far even the dual classing and housing, which are my next things to earn, are still going to be free. That, and characters aren’t going to be wiped at launch, so those of us who were in early won’t lose what we’ve done.

But since I can play it so infrequently your garden variety MMO player will race past me on a single weekend day. But that’s OK because, say it with me now, it’s free. Unfortunately it’s also Windows only, so my Mac friends can go save up for the next point release of their operating system instead of buying items for this game.

For more details hit the website.