Publisher – iMagine Machine
Reviewed for iOS
Overall Review:
This game gets nuts if you don’t learn your geometric shapes!
Some of our favorite games recently have been focused on teaching math. None of those games, however, focused much on geometry. That is all changing today with the iOS game The Land of Venn.
The Land of Venn – Geometric Defense is an adorable lane based defense game where players defend their “home base” by drawing geometric shapes using their enemies as points. For example, tapping on an enemy creates a “Point” which does a small amount of damage. Sliding your finger from one enemy to another will create a straight “Line” which will do even more damage, and so on. The levels get very challenging as time goes on so players will need to think quickly and use the various shapes to their advantage. You simply cannot just tap on one enemy until it dies or you will lose quickly.
The learning is all in the form of repetition here. There is a voice actor who will call out the name of the shape being created each time it is used. This repetition is great for rote memorization of geometric terms. The voice acting does, however, get a tad bit old after a while for people not playing the game. We had our sons use headphones after a bit.
All that said, The Land of Venn – Geometric Defense is an excellent game and will help establish a basic understanding of geometric shapes for your children without making them feel like they are memorizing shapes and charts. That is worth a loud voice actor any day of the week.
Family Gaming Assessment:
The art style is very reminiscent of the 90’s Nick Toon AAAAAH! Real Monsters. There is nothing to be concerned about here.
Playability Assessment:
This game was challenging, but even younger players will be able to grasp the early levels here. They just need to learn that tapping on enemies is a bad plan. Once they move past that strategy they will be able to progress.
The controls are all touch-based and there is very little reading involved.
Conclusion:
The Land of Venn is a must buy for parents who are looking to make sure the tablet games their children play have educational value. This is especially true for home school parents. This is a great way to casually establish a base of knowledge for higher level math.
Disclosure: Review code was provided for the purposes
