Pros: Easy and enjoyable game for young kids to play on the Wii, fun coloring mode
Cons: Probably only young kids will enjoy, limited selection of mini games
The bottom line: This game is best suited for young kids. The mini game selection is a little limited, but the coloring and sticker book mode is endless fun.
Cosmic Family is a game made for young kids and is a great easy way for kids around ages 3 to 5 to be able to enjoy the Wii video game system. This game is very easy for them to understand and play, but still has a good amount of depth and interesting activities to keep entertaining them. While it is likely to be very boring for anyone outside this age group, I consider it a valuable game for this age group, especially those that are frustrated by not being good or unable to play other games on the Wii that their older siblings are playing.

The game starts as an adventure mode. You can start the mode with a difficulty of green, yellow, or red with green being the easiest and red being the hardest. In the adventure mode you collect petals to fill up a flower meter in the left corner of the screen. The elephant cartoon character tells you instructions on what to select to get the flower petals. The main controls for this part involve you simply aiming the Wii remote at the screen and pressing A when on the item. Selecting items sometimes begins mini games and other times just play a fun animated short featuring the Cosmic Family. In the game you start on the first floor of the Cosmic Family’s rocket and move on to the next floor when you fill up a flower. There are a total of five floors to beat to see the special surprise at the end, which is really just an additional animated short.

Total there are about 20 mini games. The games appear within the adventure mode at different points and can also be accessed by exiting adventure mode by selecting the rocket icon in the bottom right of the screen. This takes you to a control room like scene where you can select the elephant guy to go back to the adventure or the purple character to go to mini game mode. In this mode you can play all the mini games whether or not you have played them in the adventure mode. Mini games vary in style including puzzles, matching, and memory games. They are fun at least at first and can also be educational in that they teach things like problem solving. The controls are pretty much the same no matter the task in that you aim with the Wii Remote and select items by pressing A. The mini games can get boring after a while, but it does offer a decent amount of game play to entertain for about half an hour to an hour at a time and they are the kind that may make kids want to come back and play again another time. Personally I think it is good they are not too addicting of mini games because it can make regulating the time the young kids play the game easier.

Between levels you are given an opportunity to color and/or play with a sticker book. This is the best part of the game because it allows kids to be creative and can offer hours and hours of entertainment even after they get tired of the minimal amount of mini games. The coloring book starts out with simple pictures of the Cosmic family characters. As you progress more complex coloring pages are added. You can also free draw. Drawing and coloring is simple with you just pressing and holding A to draw or color. The only downside to this mode is it vibrates the Wii Remote as you draw and it can be annoying, but I guess you could change your Wii Remote settings and turn rumble off if it gets too annoying. The sticker book part gives several sticker options that you can put in different background sceneries based on the areas of the Cosmic Family ship you have been to. This particular mode is what makes the game worthwhile and can really offer a lot of playtime. Unlike the mini game mode this mode can be fun to play for long periods of time and may be hard to tear away creative minds from the game when they are playing this mode.

Overall this is a great game for young kids. The graphics are a little simplistic, but they are colorful and the young kids will not care that they are not the best. The game’s mini game selection is kind of weak, but they are at least educational while being fun. The coloring and sticker book mode that lets the kids be creative is the real highlight of the game and is what makes this game great. The adventure mode can also be fun with kids discovering the different animation sequences as they click on different items.