As great as it is, $80 feels expensive to me, and that’s going to limit its audience, which is a shame. If you want to buy the Numbers game separately later, then it will cost you $30. The Osmo Starter kit costs $80, or you can lay out $100 for the Osmo Genius Kit, which also includes the Numbers game. The one thing that gives me pause in unreservedly recommending it, is the price tag. It works best as a group activity, and it’s easy to imagine it being employed to great effect in schools. One of the best ways to combat worries about your kids having too much screen time, is to make sure that their screen time includes social, physical, and interactive elements. You will need lots of paper to play the Newton and Masterpiece games. You can buy the Numbers game separately and add it to your Starter Kit. You’re going to need an iPad to play with Osmo, but it’s compatible with every model from the iPad 2 up. Up your game with these accessories, hand picked by DT editors:
#Osmo game review for free#
This is an app that Osmo has added since releasing the original pack, and it was made available for free to people who had already bought Osmo, so it’s a nice indication that the stable of games might continue to grow over time. The coolest thing about it is that you get a time-lapse video at the end, showing your hands as you sketch out a dinosaur or whatever. It’s a lot of fun, but, as a terrible artist, I probably enjoyed it more than my son. You can also import your own pictures, so your child could draw their favorite toy or their grandad. There are lots of different images to choose from in all sorts of categories with varying difficulty levels. It’s essentially a twist on tracing, where your child can watch the screen to see lines overlaid on the paper, and trace them to replicate the image. The final game also requires paper and pen, and it’s designed to encourage your budding artists’ skills at sketching. It would probably be a better idea to use a white board that you can erase after each level. We went through an awful lot of paper, before my son realized he could move the paper itself to repurpose the lines he had drawn, or just use his hands to direct the balls.īe warned, this game potentially requires a lot of paper, and you really need white paper and a dark pen when we tried with colored paper it really didn’t work.
It’s actually quite difficult, and grows more as you progress through the 60 levels. With a six year-old and a three year-old, this quickly descended into chaos (Osmo does recommend that the games are suitable for ages six and up). Balls fall continuously from the top of the screen, and you’re supposed to draw shapes on the paper to redirect them, so they hit the desired targets. It’s a physics-based puzzler in the realm of Cut the Rope. There’s no pack with Newton, so you’ll have to provide paper and pen yourself. When my three year-old daughter decided to get in on the act and began sliding letters on from the other side, we had to abandon game. All progress was lost, which really frustrated my son. Playing the game for around half an hour, it crashed twice, bumping us back to the home screen. We did encounter a couple of bugs playing Words.
To elevate things above traditional Hangman, the difficulty ramps up and additional challenges are thrown into the mix, such as a time element, urging you to hurry, or a lower limit on wrong guesses. When you guess a word correctly, you earn points for it. Wrong guesses are displayed at the top of the screen. You get a picture on screen with a row of blanks at the bottom and you have to move letters into the center to spell out the word, just like Hangman. There are a couple of different modes here: I Spy is for guessing words based on pictures, Junior is for learning words, and there’s a Custom option where you can choose topics or create your own. You can play the Words game together, or you can opt to play against each other. We moved on to Words, which comes with two complete sets of letters in red and blue. It was a little frustrating for him if he knocked an existing shape apart while trying to place a new piece, but on the whole, it’s pretty forgiving about placement, and he definitely enjoyed it. Once he had the idea, he was zooming through the easy puzzles, and the shapes began to get more complex. It’s a nice extra level of gamification that definitely encouraged my son to play for longer than he otherwise would have. If you manage to complete a puzzle marked by a tower, then you can set the people inside free. You can select different difficulty levels for the Tangram challenges, and there’s a map of the completed puzzles that gradually unfolds and expands as they’re successfully dispatched. Osmo aims to break down the digital barrier with the physical world, and teach kids in a fun way.