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

One of may favorite franchises, stemming from its humor, guns and gadgets, is the Sony-published Ratchet and Clank. Having enjoyed every outing since its humble beginnings on the PS2, R&C’s first retail and digital outings were must plays for me on the PS3. With little effort, it’s now one of my kid’s favorites and they’re eagerly waiting the next release this Fall.

As a standard fare action-platformer, the game revolves around jumping around and shooting no-good-nick’s and local aggressive wildlife with a myriad of different exotic weapons. This in and of itself presents an interesting situation in which my kids will be watching me blast baddies for extended periods of time. For me, since the evil-doers consist of cartooned robots, aliens, and abnormal creatures, the display is no worse than some current Saturday morning cartoons. That’s not to say there has not been any backlash. My two daughters have taken a liking to turn sticks into guns and lash out the occasional “bang bang” or “shoot shoot”, which requires consistent negative reinforcement to reduce this behavior. My oldest daughter has requested many times to play the game and tried a few times, but she was never able to grasp the control scheme. While control of the character was doable, having to jump, navigate tight areas, or using the gadgets proved too complicated.

From a humor standpoint, Ratchet and Clank usually contains minor toilet humor but nothing I would call above a PG rating. Well, maybe some of it reaches into PG-13 territory, but overall its relatively mild. All of these comments are over the heads of my two kids, so there has been no concern of it working its way into their daily vocabulary. Now that’s not say that they haven’t enjoyed the pirate robots or we haven’t heard “Yar!” shouted, although I may have egged that on. Personally, my own lexicon contains quite a bit of vulgar, and potty speech. So it’s already a constant battle of mediation on my speech and reprimanding on them to ensure my two little parrots don’t go around squawking my own verbiage.

One of the parts that my children extremely enjoy are the stories and the lively characters that permeate these titles. In fact, the PSN-specific Quest for Booty became known as the “pirate game”. The hardest part was trying to relay the fact that game was over and that we would have to wait a few months for the next game. If there had been more replay-ability, this title would have seen quite a bit more screen time. The last disc-based version received quite a bit of play time collecting all the weapons and unlocking the special events; and, had it featured true PSN Trophy support probably would have seen 100% completion, to which my daughters would have been thrilled.

All in all, I would recommend this adventure with your kids as long as you don’t mind the minor violence and speech. I’m not going to tell you what is the right environment for your kids. That is a conscious decision you must make as a parent. Also, if your kids are 5+, they should be able to graduate from watching to playing the game for further enjoyment.

ESRB Rating: E for Everyone

Alcohol Reference, Crude Humor,
Fantasy Violence, Language

Average web score: 7.1/10
(according to TestFreaks)