mii-d-crowleyThis review was written by PN contributor, D. Crowley. 

 

I must admit, when I first heard the game’s name I was a bit intrigued. The idea of an educational superhero game sounded like a pretty good idea to me, and I still believe this idea could become a very good game. Unfortunately, Super Hero Math for the Wii U is not the great game I was hoping for.

Super Hero Math pits you in the role of a super-hero who has the abilities of shooting small blue pellets, and flying. The game plays a lot like a 2D space shooter. There are a number of objects flying at you, including missiles, alien spaceships, coins, red and yellow mines, and rods with blue lightning stuff. Coins increase your score, but everything else will blow your character up. Oddly enough, however, your blue pellets only destroy the alien spaceships, and missiles; they fly straight through every other object, making them almost unnecessary.

super-hero-math-additionAfter ten seconds of gameplay the game pauses and your character is surrounded in a block of ice. An addition problem scrolls down onto the screen and a voice slowly tells you the math problem as it slowly shows up. (Twenty-five… plus… two… equals…) Then you’re given four numbers which correspond to the face buttons, A,B,X, and Y. Choose the correct answer and the game continues as normal. Choose incorrectly and your character becomes frozen, and can’t be moved until the next addition problem comes up; leaving you defenseless against enemies. So the game is basically ten seconds of gameplay, addition problem, ten seconds of gameplay, addition problem, etc.

The problem is that it gets boring very quickly. After playing for five minutes you’ve seen everything it has to offer. And sadly the gameplay itself is rather dull. Your character does everything very slowly. It takes almost five seconds to go from the top of the screen to the bottom. Your character fires pellets slowly, which travel across the screen very slowly; it takes almost ten seconds for one pellet to leave the screen. In addition to those problems, the game very slowly hands out enemies and coins, making the action quite limited. The game also doesn’t give you a time limit for the addition, so if the math is giving you trouble feel free to grab a paper and pencil, or a calculator, and solve the problem. The game doesn’t mind waiting.

super-hero-math-gameplayNow I know I’m not the target audience for this game, so I asked the youngest person I could find at the time (12 years old) what they thought. They said, “I wish it was faster.”, “I don’t like how it doesn’t use the Control Stick.”, and, “I didn’t like it.”. They did say, though, that they liked how you could be a boy or girl, which I also thought was a nice touch.

The only other positive things I can say about the game, is that the music is decent, it has three layers of parallax scrolling in the background, and it saves your high-score – (even to the thousandths!). Other than those few positives, however, I can’t say anything else good about the game. The worst part, though, is that it currently costs $7.99! For only five minutes worth of content, I cannot recommend this game. Only get it if you think it looks interesting, and it’s on sale.super-hero-math-banner