Cricket Kids: Opposites (iOS) Review

As somebody who is only a few years away from turning the big FOUR-ZERO, I often find myself looking at the educational resources available to my children and think to myself (and sometimes saying aloud to them), “Back in my day, we didn’t have [insert some cool thing].  You all have it good!”  The apps by Slim Cricket are among my edu-tainment envy, but the latest title Cricket Kids: Opposites, is a bit different from their other story-book focused apps.

Titles like Alizay, Pirate Girl and The Witch With No Name were essentially read-to-me storybooks, that were filled with interactive things to touch and do.  Each title employed the use of your mobile device’s features like the accelerometer, the microphone, and the front-facing camera.  Cricket Kids: Opposites offers that, as well, the but experience is significantly shorter, and without the lengthy story everything can be done in about 5 minutes.  Gone, too, is the unique personality behind the storybook characters, replaced with an orange (female) and a blue (male) cricket kid.

The cricket kids do what they need to though, they help demonstrate the difference between opposite-meaning words, and when the program is educational, your characters don’t always need to take center stage and upstage the point of the application.

Opposites are shown in a variety of different mini-game scenarios, where interacting with the objects or with your mobile device, will go from one word to its opposite.  This is often done by using the touch-screen, but as shown in the series of images below, shaking your device, or using the device’s camera are also used to interact with the scenes.

Shake the iPad and a TIDY room…

…becomes an UNTIDY room.

It could be a region thing, or a North American vs. Europe (or France where SlimCricket is located) English terminology preference, but I couldn’t help but smile at one of the colloquial differences with some of the words chosen, especially when “tidy” and “untidy” were used to describe a room in the app where our family would have used “clean” or “messy.”

I showed the application to my kids, as an alternative to bedtime reading.  My 6-year-old breezed through each opposite scenario, and was sort of ready to do something else, but my 4-year-old seemed a bit more enraptured and eager to go back and play it again.

Cricket Kids: Opposites was reviewed on a 3rd-generation iPad.  While I felt that the experience with Opposite could have been longer and offered more contrasting words, it’s also currently priced at $1.99, which is half the cost of SlimCricket’s storybook apps.

While I suppose they could have included in-app purchases for additional opposites scenarios and content, which seems to be the trend today, I’m glad they didn’t do that.  As much as I love that my kids can learn through apps on my iPad, I see a growing trend of cheaper or free apps that requires additional costs to unlock the full experience.  I appreciate SlimCricket for not doing that with Opposites.

Would I recommend purchasing this app for parents of young children?  I would, but considering all of the great SlimCricket interactive storybook apps, Cricket Kids: Opposites would be last on the list.  I say that simply because it’s significantly shorter and it didn’t hold the interest of my 6-year-old the same way their other apps did.  Granted, there is a quiz mode, that helps lengthen the experience.  This mode is for kids who can read where they’re tasked to match the correct adjective to an image, but it was far less enjoyable than the opposites scenes.

If you’ve never tried a SlimCricket app, start out with The Witch With No Name (and click the link to read our review), and if your kids enjoy that, then plunk down the $2 for Cricket Kids: Opposites.