Wombi Detective – a crime solving mystery game for kids

Waste of money

While I agree with the earlier reviewers that the characters in the app are definitely not speaking English, I don't think that causes any serious problems with gameplay. I thought what they were speaking might even be gibberish. It's difficult to tell because all of the voices are cartoonish. In any case, each mystery can be solved without needing to understand what they are saying. I'll explain the gameplay for anyone who wants to help a child play without having to play through it with them to figure it out. The game goes as follows. A victim of a theft calls you (the detective). They presumably say what has been stolen and a picture of the item pops up. Then you get to select each of the three buttons along the bottom to get a description of the thief. One button reveals his eye color, another shows what kind of hat he wears, and a third describes his height. The last one might be a bit tricky for kids to figure out, but can easily be explained. The thief is picked from a lineup standing in front of horizontal bands of color. The height description is given as a stick figure drawn in the color of the band that the thief's height falls into. Importantly, they use what the character's height would be without his hat. It's not particularly intuitive, but is easy enough to explain. The player is given as many guesses as needed to find who in the lineup matches the eye color, type of hat, and height from the description of the thief. The next part of the game gives you three pictures of objects that the player must drag onto one section of a scene. For instance, beach balls and shells should be dragged to the beach; pine cones and leaves go to the forest. When you've dragged an the images to the right area, you can enter the scene and began searching for the missing object. In the forest scene you dig holes and follow arrows that are revealed. For the beach scene you use a metal detector. Follow the beeps until the light on the detector turns green, then tap it to dig there. In the garage scene, you use a flashlight to scan the room. Tap the stolen object when you see it in the flashlight beam. In the house scene, you tap cabinets until you find a key, the drag the key to a locked cabinet and tap on the stolen item within. In the construction site scene, you just drag junk aside until the stolen object is revealed, then tap on it. And that's the whole game. A child could play through a round in just a couple of minutes or take their time. The only flaws I found were that when using the flashlight and metal detector, your finger blocks the area you're trying to look at. It would be easier if there was a slight offset.