{"id":18948,"date":"2019-04-15T00:01:13","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T00:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=18948"},"modified":"2019-03-28T12:26:09","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T12:26:09","slug":"thomas-and-friends-adventures-ios-android","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/15\/thomas-and-friends-adventures-ios-android\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas and Friends Adventures (iOS, Android)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Thomas the train wasn\u2019t around yet when I was a kid, but if he was, I probably would\u2019ve been really into that, as I loved reading about trains when I was little (although their faces kind of creep me out).\u00a0 In fact, two of my favorite Little Golden Books were The Little Engine that Could and The Little Red Caboose.\u00a0 And now your little engineers can go on globetrotting adventures with Thomas and his train pals with Thomas and Friends Adventures.\u00a0 They\u2019ll build railroad tracks and compete in train races, all the while learning about different cultures and countries, as well as relatable lessons like being scared, telling the truth, making friends, and more along the way!\u00a0 Thomas and Friends Adventures is a free to start app you can download on iOS and Android devices, but reviewed on iPad here.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll start the game on a globe and can pick one country at first: China.\u00a0 It\u2019s free but you have to purchase the other countries with stories, as well as train packs, separately.\u00a0 In each country is a train track with stops.\u00a0 At each stop is an activity.\u00a0 You\u2019ll either watch a movie, build a train track, or have a race.\u00a0 Completing each activity will unlock a new train or object for you to use when building tracks.\u00a0 Go around the track once to finish that country\u2019s story, but you can still play the activities to unlock more things.<\/p>\n

There are two ways you can build tracks.\u00a0 Some require you to use a blueprint and match the right track or object to a spot on the grid.\u00a0 The drag and drop controls are easy to learn.\u00a0 Other times you can just free build whatever you want.\u00a0 When you are done, you can place a train on the tracks, and view the action from the train\u2019s eye point of view, which is the best part of the game.\u00a0 Races aren\u2019t quite as good. You just hold down a button to go, and sometimes you can push a turbo button for a burst of speed, and that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The game has a few other minor problems, too.\u00a0 I wish that there was a separate option to do the free build tracks on the main menu, as that\u2019s the best part of the game.\u00a0 At least it\u2019s easy just to go to a country.\u00a0 Also, one of the places you visit is the fictional island of Sodor.\u00a0 For a game that is all about learning about other countries, having a fictional place in there seems to defeat the purpose.\u00a0 And last, since there is no reading skill required, everything has spoken voice.\u00a0 You can opt to turn off the voices, but then that makes the game kind of hard to play since there are no subtitles or anything.\u00a0 So you always have to have the volume on to play.\u00a0 But I imagine these problems could be fixed with updates. Speaking of which, the game hints at even more updates and new countries, so that might be promising.\u00a0 If you have little Thomas fans in your house, they\u2019ll probably love this app.\u00a0 Parental supervision is recommended for the in-game purchases, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas the train wasn\u2019t around yet when I was a kid, but if he was, I probably would\u2019ve been really into that, as I loved reading about trains when I was little (although their faces kind of creep me out).\u00a0 In fact, two of my favorite Little Golden Books were The Little Engine that Could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":18934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews","category-movie-reviews","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18948"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18950,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18948\/revisions\/18950"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}