Product Reviews

It's usually easy to pigeon-hole modern games, but there's something different about Wild Earth Africa: the shooting it asks you to do is done with a camera rather than a gun. You're a freelance nature photographer, tasked with exploring eight locations in the African Serengeti National Park, taking snaps of the wildlife to illustrate an informative article.

There's plenty here for kids to enjoy. The photos taken are automatically inserted into an informative wildlife awareness article, complete with hyperlinks to interesting nature-based websites. It's an engaging way to educate without forcing the issue. Not least because the

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game looks pretty, plays well and has some witty dialogue between the two narrators.

A level consists of a series of primary objectives to photograph and a set of secondary targets to embellish your article. With your objectives clearly shown, you're unleashed on to a mostly open area of the Serengeti. Should you start wandering aimlessly in this vast arena, a compass helpfully pops up to show the way to the next primary objective.

Despite the non-violent gameplay there is danger, though not the sort you'd expect. Get too close to a subject and the environmental impact bar starts to drop; if it drops too far, you're hauled off the mission. Take more photos and this bar rises again, as you raise environmental awareness with the article your shots are illustrating.

It's the lack of challenge that's our biggest issue: the compass and ease of keeping your environmental impact bar high mean levels are a stroll rather than a test of skill. Even with the interest of reading the end-of-level article and seeing your photos, there's not quite enough satisfaction at completing a level. Unless your child is nutty about nature, we suspect they will get bored quickly and move back to games where you shoot to kill.