Miss Spider is an experience that should keep your little gamers busy and entertained for quite a while.
Miss Spider's Harvest Time Hop and Fly is a little adventure game that is divided into four simple mini-games. As the title states, it's harvest time, so Miss Spider and her helpful insect children are gathering fruits to prepare for the winter.
The gameplay is very simple: in Adventure mode, Miss Spider moves around Sunny Patch (the game world) finding harvest spots, where her kids will then collect the fruits. These harvest spots are represented by orange dots on the map, and each begins a mini-game. In the mini-games, you control one of the children and the objective is to collect all the fruits (strawberries, blueberries and acorns) in a given level.
In the bounce stages, you play as Bounce, hopping around in a side-scrolling platform stage. Bounce can perform regular jumps, boost jumps and stomp jumps. Boost jumps use honeysuckle, which you can collect up to three at a time, and stomps break rocks to access other areas. You will never find yourself stuck, since you can backtrack and pick up more honeysuckle anytime, as they constantly reappear.
The dragonfly stages have you taking control of Dragon, flying in a constantly scrolling screen. In this game, the honeysuckle is what gives Dragon energy to keep on flying. Being hit by obstacles (dandelion seeds, waterfalls, leaves or thorns) will drain your energy, as does flying, so you have to pick up those flowers as you see them to keep going.
In the floating stages, you play as Squirt, who floats on a spider web on a constantly vertical-scrolling screen. You blow on the microphone to keep him afloat long enough to move around and collect the fruits.
My favorite of all four mini-games is the Shimmer and Wiggle game. Here you don't control the characters directly, they keep moving left to right as the screen scrolls by. Instead, you have to use the stylus to collect the fruits and get rid of obstacles. To collect a fruit, you draw a circle around it and Shimmer will fly over to pick it and drop it. Wiggle will automatically catch the fruit once he walks by it. To destroy thorns or floating leaves, you tap on them with the stylus.
All these simple tasks only require you to collect the fruit and reach the exit (represented by a big medal with Miss Spider on it at the end of each stage). The only thing you have to keep an eye on is your energy bar and the number of fruits collected. If the energy bar is empty, you have to restart the game, which completely eliminates the "Game Over" experience.
Once you complete a harvest stage, the orange dot on the Sunny Patch map turns blue, and the number of fruits collected is added to your total. To open up other areas of the map you will need to collect set amounts of fruit. You don't have to collect all the fruits in every level, just enough to progress. You need 400 fruits to reach the last stage of the game.
Every time you complete a task in the Adventure mode, you open up the mini-games in the Bug-a-Bonus. When you complete the game in Adventure mode, all stages will be available in Bug-a-Bonus. Play the Bug-a-Bonus games to collect stars and unlock images in the Gallery.
The only thing I was hoping for was an actual ending. Once you complete the last stage, you are taken to the credits while on the top screen a landscape scrolls by and the characters will appear. I was expecting something else though. Since the family was preparing for the winter, we should see a little scene where it's snowing outside and Miss Spider and her children enjoy a meal in their hideout, and a big pile of fruits is seen in the background. It would give the story some closure.
Aimed primarily at children aged 3 to 8, Harvest Time Hop and Fly is a colorful game with adorable characters. When the little bugs turn to you with those huge eyes and smile at the end of a stage, you can't help but smile back. The graphics are sharp and bright, and the music is pleasant without becoming repetitive. The simple gameplay controls and level design ensure the experience is very kid-friendly.
Granted, it's somewhat short, but Miss Spider is an experience that should keep your little gamers busy and entertained for quite a while.
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