Kids App of the Week: Leonardo's Cat
Did you know that Leonardo da Vinci loved cats? That’s just one of the many actual facts you learn as you play through StoryToy’s Leonardo’s Cat, a $2.99 collection of 60 well-crafted logic puzzles for the iPad that start easy, thanks to a handy tutorial, and then get very hard.
Each puzzle involves dragging and dropping one of nine da Vinci-inspired devices into place on a path so that his cat can pick up a reward without getting bonked, dunked, or fried. There’s no explicitly graphic or worrisome content other than classic cartoon violence, and this cat has an unlimited number of lives.
Commentary is provided by Leonardo himself, depicted as a white-bearded old inventor with a slight British accent (supplied by Sir Patrick Stewart of Star Trek and X-Men fame).
In the story, Leonardo’s latest invention, the Automaton, has been stolen by Michelangelo. You send Scungilli, Leonardo’s cat, into an ancient city to find the parts. Each level contains a animated movie that illustrates some of the actual products made by da Vinci. The game takes place in Amboise, an animated version of da Vinci’s studio. The more levels you play, the more robot parts you collect that are used to reassemble da Vinci’s Automaton.
The inventions include parachutes, spring ramps, cannons, catapults and ornithopters (wings); each must be fine-tuned before it can work. Success requires repeated testing and debugging, and the later levels can get tricky. For example, there may be different paths in the same maze, and the water or fire pits that take up many cat lives. The 60 levels provide lots of challenges.
However, Leonardo’s Cat did cough up a few hairballs. Our game testers were frustrated by the inability to pinch and pull into Da Vinci’s actual work (especially the Mona Lisa), and noted that there is a “win or lose” element to the puzzles, when a “you lose!” banner appears if the cat dies. (A simple “try again” would suffice.) It would be nice to get some specific feedback from da Vinci when struggling. Other suggestions: Make it easier to reset a level and include a sandbox mode. None of these are deal breakers, but they are important to note.
There’s a lot of star power in Leonardo’s Cat, aside from having Captain Jean Luc Picard as the great inventor. The characters were created by Michael Frith (The Muppets, Fraggle Rock), with script writing and scientific writing by Bob Tedeschi (New York Times, Bobo Explores Light).
The bottom line? This is a fun, challenging app with no gimmicks or in-app purchases. And it even contains an underlying layer of scientific authenticity that is rare these days.
Leonardo’s Cat
iPad
$2.99
Ages: 6+
Warren Buckleitner, Ph.D., is editor of Children’s Technology Review, an ad-free, subscriber-supported publication that was founded in 1993. Did you like this review? Get hundreds more for just $20/year, atwww.childrenstech.com/subscribe).
