Hidden Animals: English - Spanish

A nice game as such, but containing unforgivable mistakes in the vocabulary that it’s supposed to teach you, and badly optimised in my opinion. I bought this game for my 9 year old daughter, who likes hidden object games and is quite good in them - but there aren't that many suitable for children, so I was happy to find this one. Since we are neither English nor Spanish native speakers, I was prepared to translate for her and the game wasn't meant as an educational tool, but she learns English in school, so I hoped she would also pick up a few animal names while playing. But very early she got frustrated by the fact, that it seemed simply impossible to get three golden stars and thus uncover more pieces of the bonus puzzle, no matter how quick she was or how hard she tried (I tried to help with that and didn't succeed either) - so she stopped playing because it was driving her to tears, and I bought her Hidden Animals Photo Hunt instead to make up for this disappointment. Then I started playing myself. I got through all the levels, but I wasn’t able to figure out how the scoring works. At first I thought one just had to be really quick, but sometimes I got three stars when it took me 60 seconds and sometimes 30 seconds wasn’t enough for even one star, so I didn’t have a clue. Eventually I developed an effective way how to exercise my newly acquired language skills - after opening a level find all the animals in it and try to name them one by one, and only after that start clicking on the 8 randomly chosen – which turned out to be also an effective way how to receive three stars, so I guess it’s good mechanics in itself, but having to find that out by trial and error wasn’t that great. This was long after I decided not to mind the scoring (even though it kept me slightly wondering because it just seemed completely random) and concentrate on actually learning a few Spanish words just for fun and some new English words too, because to this day I never knew what a curlew was for instance (neither in my own language). Very soon it became clear that this won’t work without a Spanish dictionary (with pronunciation, because what use is knowing how to write a word in foreign language when you don’t know how to say it), a zoological encyclopedia and lots and lots of googling – because there was a lot of birds pictured as seen from a distance that weren’t recognisable at all, animals I wasn’t sure about and didn’t know their English name, and some I thought I knew but the English name given didn’t correspond with that. And thus I found the greatest fault of this game, one that simply doesn’t allow for a positive review: there are mistakes in the vocabulary. You get a picture of a stag beetle – yet are given “dor-beetle” as its English name, and “el escarabajo de oro“ as its Spanish name, which appears to be a jewel scarab Chrysina resplendens. You get a picture of a grosbeak and the right English name for it - yet are given the Spanish name for a great spotted woodpecker (el pico picapinos). The same goes for a hyena, that is passed to you as a lynx (el lince) in Spanish. You get a picture of a silver angelfish – yet are given “sailfish“ both in English and Spanish (el pez vela), which is a very interesting fish with a characteristic dorsal fin that I didn't know at all before. And so on. (Please do correct me on any of these if I'm wrong.) If you are really dedicated to learning the right names, you’ll find all that for yourself, and it certainly teaches you not to trust everything that is written and verify your information. But I doubt the game was meant to remind you of the importance of that instead of teaching you the correct words. Also, I went through all the English-Spanish levels, so that I would be able to learn the Spanish names of all the animals in the game, and then practice them in the Spanish levels. But there are a few animals that are not present in the bilingual levels, and then appear in the Spanish ones – how is one supposed to learn those? Again the only way is to use a dictionary outside the game, which is uncomfortable and the game being designed this way somewhat goes against its proclaimed educational value. Plus the fact that you are given 8 randomly chosen animals in each level to find and thus practice resulted for me in getting the same animals again and again and again most of the time, while others weren't chosen but once or twice. This really isn't a very good way of building your vocabulary. Then there are some minor issues. As mentioned in another review, it’s quite annoying having to click the exit icon three times in a row in order to exit the game. Much more annoying is entering the bonus puzzle every time you finish a level with 3 stars, after it has long been uncovered – one wants to revisit the levels in order to practice the words, which this feature makes rather unpleasant. And the score counting at the end of each level simply takes too long (not to mention that the dull jingle accompanying it always feels like a slap in the face after such great music in the level itself), but if you skip it, you don‘t get to see what score and how much stars did you get. I also encountered two minor bugs: in one English level there is a picture of a curlew assigned to “hoopoe“ (in other levels these two birds are correctly distinguished) and in one Spanish level a bear and a fish it carries in its mouth are wrongly assigned each to the other‘s name. Pros: Unlike one other reviewer I find the way the animals are “glued“ into the landscapes quite cute and often entertaining. And the music of course – that is undeniably good.

Lovely music makes this hidden object game better than most.

Рекомендую. Вполне себе неплохая игра за 30 то рублей. Проходится при желании очень быстро. Для себя узнал много новых слов как на английском, так и на испанском. Музыка красивая, но только депрессивная - прямо бывает, что угнетает. В остальном всё хорошо.