EA Playground

EA Playground is EA’s attempt at creating a mini-game package for kids and families. Everyone else is doing it, so why not them?

Unfortunately they’ve forgotten to make it any good, and it serves as yet another example of the Wii’s increasingly lacklustre catalogue.

EA Playground is based around the concept of playground games from your childhood, but being an American production many of these games may not be familiar to us Brits.

You get dodgeball, a game where you er, dodge balls (made famous by the movie of the same name), using the Wii remote to throw and dodge. It’s not very exciting. Slot car racing is Scalextric, but it doesn’t feel like you’re doing much since the cars are on rails.

There’s a very dull Swingball game where you swing the remote to hit a ball on a string and on similar lines, Wall ball where you bounce a ball against a wall.

The best games in the package are Kicks, Dart Shootout and Paper Racers. Kicks is a football game that has a bit more depth than the others, but even that gets dull after a while. Dart Shootout is a simple darts game that’s fun because of its use of the Wii remote and Paper Racers has you flying a paper plane, requiring skill and clever use of the Wii remote.

Verdict: 36%

A poor collection of half-hearted mini-games that has been rushed out on the cheap to appeal to people who want to make use of the Wii’s motion controls.