#We were kindly gifted a copy of Game Builder Garage and a Nintendo Switch for this review – however, all thoughts are our own.
If you have a budding game designer in your house, Nintendo has brought a game to the market which is going to be a huge hit, Game Builder Garage. Ethan has already decided that when he grows up he would like to become a game designer or a computer programmer, so this new game was right up his street.
Unlike the usual games which are simply plugged and play, this one has you building your game from scratch before you are able to get started. Which captures the imagination from the very start.
As with many Nintendo titles, they have pitched the game at the right level in terms of the difficulty level as they hold your hand through every step of the way in the tutorial and then you can let your imagination run wild. Have you ever thought about how games such as Mario are produced? This game gives you a little snippet of just how those games are built up but in a child-friendly version to build it all.
To begin with, you do need to work through the tutorials which may feel a little long, to begin with, however, they are there for a good reason. These tutorials are there to teach you how to have all the basic skills to get started on creating some amazing games. At the end of certain checkpoints, they get you to try out the game you have just created. Throughout this section, you are taught things such as how to place a character and how they move to create objects which can be turned on or off or even destroyed. By the end of these tutorials, you will have created 7 different mini-games from racing to puzzles, 2D and 3D games.
Once you are past this point though, Game Builder Garage is all yours to create whatever masterpiece you may have been creating. So all those times Ethan has played a game and said he wishes this was different or you could do something else, he has now had the chance to create this masterpiece on his own. As you can imagine, this game is not here to create the next horror game, it is aimed at families and is perfectly suitable for all age groups. Although the game does a lot of the coding and building work for you, it is the perfect place for kids to get an idea of what is involved in game design and programming.
Ethan was a little unsure when it came to the tutorials, as a typical boy he just wanted to jump right in with 2 feet and get cracking to see what he could do. However, having the tutorials and help tools along the way helped him to understand the basis of the game and create the game style he wanted to play.
The first games he created, although short was great fun. We spent ages playing the ball tag game which had some simple mechanics however made us laugh so much as we tried to escape not only each other but the big bouncing balls falling from the sky!
With an RRP of £29.99, this is one of the more affordable games on the market and I can see with the October half term and Christmas coming up this could be the perfect all-around family game. There are hours of fun to be had in this game as you fall down the rabbit hole into the world of game design.
We love gaming in our family and this review is just one of a few that we will have coming up, from console reviews to MMO’s and beyond. We are creating a little pocket of the internet to share our thoughts on the latest games and news to hit the market. You can keep up to date with this all here.