Possibly the toy I like least in my house is a Cry Baby. Fill it with water and it cries out gold, glittery tears until the end of time. You can’t drain out the water, because it’s all locked away in that giant, dopey head. So no matter what you do, golden water is going to seep into anything and everything. Ugh, it’s made me want to race downstairs and chuck it in a charity bag.
So, you can imagine our thrill at playing an entire video game dedicated to the tear-duct vandals. On the one hand, we were relieved that the tears were all digital. On the other, we wondered whether we could get a form of revenge in the review. But we’re not that petty. Honest.
Cry Babies isn’t just a toy. It’s a popular TV series on various streaming services, and Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game does a decent job of emulating it. You get to play twelve of the main characters from the show, and – from what my daughters tell me – the game wheels in their original voice actors. This is a reasonably one-to-one replication of the TV experience.
That stretches to the game worlds too. They’re nothing more than hubs for minigames, but you get to visit locations from the show including Baby Bottle Valley, Fantasy Mountain, Tutti Frutti Bay and Icy World. I’m reliably informed that Planet Tear is not in the show, but perhaps it’s only a matter of time before that happens.
What isn’t in the show is the general plot thrust of Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game. Lady, Coney, Dreamy and friends are drawn into a grand competition to win a Golden Pacifier. This is the ‘Big Game’ of the title. To win the Golden Pacifier, the team needs to get their tiny mitts on four silver pacifiers from each region. That might sound like a challenge, but it mostly involves wandering over to Cry Babies in each level and completing their challenges. There’s no Olympic-style heats or races against other Cry Babies: you’re just ticking off what the baby wants you to do.
Those four challenges per region tend to follow a patten. The first three are randomly plucked from a rhythm action minigame, a photographing game that cribs from Duck Hunt and Pokemon Snap, and a collect-’em-all game in a small arena. The rhythm action stuff is exactly what you’re first imagining: Guitar Hero beats, vaguely connected to the music in the background, travel along a track and you need to press the correct button when they reach the circle on the far-left. We can’t remember a minigame collection that didn’t have this kind of game attached.
The Pokemon Snap/Duck Hunt game is dirt simple too. Things fly across the screen, and you have to photograph them within the time-frame. You’re capturing stars and babies with bow ties, all while a generous time limit ticks down. Finally, there’s the collectathon, which is nothing more than running around a small area, sometimes a maze, and grabbing the hide-and-seek Cry Babies or fruits that the level wants you to find.
Get a thumbs up in each of these (something that an adult will find trivial, but a four-year old might take a couple of goes on), and you’re participating in the Silver Pacifier challenge. This is a maze with varying levels of complexity. There are dead ends, switches that open doors, and levers that open one door but close others. There’s the merest inkling of complexity to these sections, as you have to remember where you’ve been, as well as find the three pacifiers that unlock the exit. If there’s a chance to get stuck, it’s here, as things like tunnels and pacifiers can occasionally be difficult to spot against the background. Not that anyone over the age of six, say, would hit these road-bumps.
And that’s all that she wrote, because Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game is neither complex nor particularly large. In fact, that ‘Big Game’ in the title is a massive troll from the developers. There are four minigames here, repeated five times (once per world), and it takes roughly an hour and a half to complete them all. ‘Big Game’, my eye. For £29.99, that’s a stinker of a cost-per-hour ratio. The Parent Tax is very definitely being applied here.
But while it took me 90 minutes to complete, I’m not exactly the target demographic. Plus I’m very aware that I’m carrying a desire for vengeance against the Cry Babies. My four-year old had a short-lived but enjoyable time with Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game. That’s mostly down to the accessibility: we’re short of games on the Xbox that she can actually play, and Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game is in their esteemed company. She can complete every last one of the minigames without much trouble, as there’s barely more than one button to press and the objectives couldn’t be clearer. Plus, daddy can join in with local co-op. That’s rare and should be celebrated.
She can’t play it completely on her own, however, and this is where the Cry Babies take a little stumble. There’s a lot of text in Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game, and only a small proportion is voiced. Since it’s aimed at pre-reading children, this is a strange omission: particularly as the voice actors for the babies were already in the studio. Plus, there are additional button presses when there really didn’t need to be. Did the in-game shop have to be quite so complicated, with multiple steps and the holding of buttons? And did our littlest really have to press additional buttons to pick up items or hit switches? Couldn’t those have been automatic once the player walked into them?
The opposite of a shout-out goes to the timers, too. We’re not completely convinced that a ticking clock is needed for this kind of game. Young players are already wrestling with game controllers – they don’t need the threat of a timer to add to their woes. An option to turn these off would have been welcome.
The judgmental games journalist in me also wants to highlight, once again, the sheer threadbareness of Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game. While our daughter was fine with the four minigames and the ninety minutes runtime, she also didn’t come back to Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game after the first two sessions. She may have enjoyed her time with it, but her time was measured in tens of minutes, and that’s not a whole lot of babysitting for the price of £30.
As a throwaway, hour-long distraction for a pre-school player, Cry Babies Magic Tears: The Big Game is surprisingly accessible and true to the TV show. But we’re not so loaded that we’d consider 30-quid particularly ‘throwaway’. A future sale might make this rather small ‘Big Game’ more tempting but – for now – we’d advise that you avoid the tears and spend your money on PAW Patrol World instead.
