Jr. Doctor Review

A site I stumbled upon when doing a search for freeware adventure games on the Internet was Curiosoft. The bright colorful graphics caught my eye and I noted inventory items in the screenshots. Surely, here was an adventure game! I downloaded the demo and started to play it when my five-year old son, Dakota, asked if he could have a turn. Well, that was the last I got to use the computer that evening… I emailed Curiosoft the next day and they were kind enough to allow me the opportunity to play their two current completed games, Jr. Vet and Jr. Doctor.

The games are similar in their design from what I can see of having played Jr. Doctor and the demo of Jr. Vet so much (or even all) of what I write here applies to both games. However, for the sake of this review, I have only played through Jr. Doctor to the end.

As the name implies, this is a game targeting children who are interested in pretending to be a doctor. This would have to be about ninety percent of children, at one time or another, in my estimation. The game is set in a hospital but the interesting variation here is that the hospital is in Fairytale Land. All of the patients are fairytale characters with humorous ailments: Humpty Dumpty has a concussion, Jack took a tumble off the beanstalk, and so on. There are a variety of patients and children will enjoy the predicaments that they are in as they relate to the well-known stories.

Anyone familiar with point and click adventures will be able to pick this up and run with it. Inventory items are scattered throughout the hospital and easily selected from the inventory section at the bottom of the screen. There is a doctor figure that provides advice about what to do and also a book that can be collected and used to identify the patients’ ailments as well as the items that are collected. There is plenty of help for even young children to be able to play. The game has three difficulty levels relating to children’s ages too, so selecting appropriate difficulty is intuitive.

The game starts off very easy but gets progressively harder as upper levels are accessed. The layout is more like a school than a hospital, with many corridors, each with a number of rooms off them. In later cases, patients have more than one ailment that must be treated. This may require application of bandages first and then medicine, for example. If the wrong item is selected, the player must once again present the items in the required order. Once a patient has been treated successfully, there is often a simple arcade game in which the player must remove all the bacteria in a simple Space Invaders type game. Failure here means only that the player must attempt the game again.

Successive levels can only be reached once all three patients are treated on any given level. There are four levels, which are reached through the elevator, after which a fifth level presents the player with a certificate of achievement as a “junior doctor”. It is a shame that there is no indication that a level has been completed. The player can only be sure be going in the elevator and trying the next floor up-if it doesn’t work, there are still more patients to cure!

The game’s graphics are simple two-dimensional images but are likely to engage children with their bright colors. Children will enjoy the simple animations as successful treatments are applied.

The music is light and lively and voiceovers are easy to understand. Much of the dialog is repeated to help children to remember. There is no text option, which could have been paired with the voice to encourage early reading as well as allowing hearing impaired children to experience the game. I found the voiceovers to have an echoing quality, as though they were recorded in a box or a small room but otherwise they were adequate for the job.

The game is small and easily downloadable from Curiosoft. It worked to some extent in Windows 98 but is intended for Windows XP and Windows 2000. I experienced freezing after a period of about fifteen minutes almost every time I played it. This was unfortunate as the game only saves on exit from the elevator. Any freezing results in having to restart the level. I am uncertain whether it freezes any less frequently under the intended operating systems but the game has a “safe mode”, which is intended “if the game freezed”, a rather unfortunate grammatical error considering this is somewhat educational in nature. Perhaps Curiosoft might consider a patch if they can figure out what causes the freezing. If not, try emailing [email protected] for advice.

This is an entertaining game for children but there is only limited longevity in it (perhaps an hour or two) for adult players. Despite that, I imagine that children would enjoy playing it again and again because of the intuitiveness of the interface, gentle humor, and bright colors. I am doubtful about the relative educational value of the game but Curiosoft makes no bones about this. It is marketed as inexpensive entertainment and in that regard it succeeds very well.

This game deserves a C+ for adults or A- for children.

Final Grade: C+ (A- for kids) (find out more about our grading system)