Thomas & Friends - Building the New Line (PC)

- Although all the Thomas games are released by Mindscape and have similar packaging, this game is developed by a different studio than others you may already have or I'd recommend to get (Great Festival Adventure, Trouble on the Tracks)

- The game graphics are simpler and poorer than the other games, but mainly the game concepts are far less varied and less educational than the other games. Almost all the sub-games involve repeated clicking in the same spot, or possibly alternately clicking between two spots (oooh!). This is in sharp contrast to the colour-matching, shape-matching, size-ordering, instruction-following, etc. of the other games.

- There's almost no value in the two difficulty levels, they're virtually the same game, they differ primarily in whether the track setup requires you to place pieces correctly by shape - which is assisted anyway, and doesn't cause my 2-1/2 year old any trouble so why bother?

- The game is short compared with the others, even when you count going back and playing as another of the four trains (which makes no difference to the gameplay), or playing at another of the three destinations (almost ditto - at the quarry your child may be repeatedly loading and unloading boxes marked with coal while at the farm they may be identical boxes marked with corn, or it may be pieces a crate your child is removing from the track rather than bails of hay)

Go and buy one of the other games for your little Thomas-aholic.

then you can decorate the area with trees and plants etc, and go round the track, with little events happening to the train chosen, that you have to sort out, such as items going on the tracks etc that you have to move, etc.

and you can click on things as they light up as the train passes, to put water in the engine, to load cargo, to change track direction, and if you put the pointer over some of the things by the tracks and click the button, they fall onto the tracks for you to pick up.

then you clean the train up, decorate him, and you get a (very short) sequence, and a picture of the branch line is kept in a mail box on the title page of the game.

my son loves it, and i should give it 5 stars really, its just a few little things could be improved, like allowing more plants to be put in, getting more things to happen when racing round the track, and there is a niggly thing where if your little 'un likes a particular track e.g. the one that you can put a tunnel on, you have to change and delete players names often, as it only allows you to make one branch line per train track, per place it's in, so we keep going to play a new game, but finding the track already completed, because he completed it a few days ago.
and it would be good to have some more activities, and more of the activites having a little bit more of an educational element in,

but a 2 1/2 year old doesn't really notice or mind this anyway.
i have to limit him to 2 games per day, or else he'd be on it most of the time.
k.