Review: Baby Play Face iPad app

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Scenes from Baby Play Face

Picky Kid Rating: 1.7

I cringe when B opens Baby Play Face, which luckily is not often. I find the digital face to be creepy, and the voiceover annoyingly repetitive because it’s so limited. These things do not bother B as much, but she is frustrated that she can’t change the baby’s face by herself (there are four faces to choose from), and that touching the buttons results in pop-up windows prompting in-app purchases.

The base version of the application is free. This gets the four baby faces that respond to touch. As the player touches different areas of the face, the face reacts, a word pops up, and the narration reinforces the word. There are about ten active areas with vocabulary words. In-app purchases are available for $0.99 a pop for Expressions (shaking the iPad will make the baby “angry”, “sad” or “happy”), a Multi-lingual mode, or recording your own voiceover. We purchased Expressions, but it is difficult for a two-year-old to shake an iPad (and should we really shake babies anyway)?

In the picky kid’s opinion, in-app purchases for children’s games should be difficult to access, not up-front like they are in Baby Play Face, where their accessibility interrupts gameplay, and a parent must say “no, don’t touch that.”

Even though Baby Play Face is free, we don’t recommend it.

Tagged as: fine motor skills, vocabulary