The story begins by explaining that you’re in a library researching a project. Having grown tired, you decide to take a break and flick through a picture book, eventually falling asleep. You awake to find yourself in the Make 10 Kingdom, a place which is inhabited by odd creatures known as Pixies. Before you can explore your new surroundings, you are greeted by King Decimus, who assigns you the task of meeting the nine Make 10 Masters who govern the kingdom. While the story is always present, it tends to be uninteresting and you’ll often find yourself skipping through slabs of text just to continue.
As its title suggests, the game’s primary focus is for players to make 10 and multiples of 10 (20, 30, etc) through various mini-games. These range from Do we Make 10 which requires you to look at numbers on flash cards and say if they add up to 10 or not, to Perfect Match where you have to drag match sticks and create a calculation that adds up to 10. In total there are around thirty mini-games to unlock, and each one is genially clever and different from one another, which keeps things feeling fresh and interesting. Additionally, if you’re having a little trouble with a mini-game, you can press an assist button which either adds time to the clock to let you think a bit longer, or in the case of Do we Make 10, lets you see the flash cards again. You will however be limited to the amount of times you can use the button, so there’s balance and it prevents people from cheating.
Do we Make 10 and Perfect Match.
To advance the story, the developers have incorporated an adventure mode dubbed Make 10 Kingdom. Here, you’re guided by a Pixie named Num Diddly through the various areas of the Make 10 Kingdom. Each area will have a Make 10 Master, and your main objective is to battle other Pixies to gain an audience with them. Battles of course are just a couple of rounds of a specific mini-game, and providing you win the match the mini-game will become available to play in the Trial Mountains mode (more about this later). Being an adventure, you’ll also be required to explore and locate the individual Pixies. This however, mainly involves pressing an arrow button to progress to the next room, it’s unimaginative and gets boring very quickly. The developers have tried to add some appeal by including a few basic puzzles such as making ten from numbers hidden in the background, but they’re recycled too frequently and make things feel repetitive.
Arguably, the main meat of the game comes from the Trial Mountains mode. Essentially, the mountains represent the different difficulty levels of each mini-game, and players have the ultimate goal to reach the top. While only a basic system, it’s very engaging as it’s designed to show you how to apply the Make 10 rules to each mini-game before giving you more challenging situations. It’s something that’s often missed in the Brain Training games, and it greatly benefits children who have just started learning maths in school.
Inevitably, players also have the option of taking a Make 10 Test. The test involves playing three random mini-games, with an overall score awarded for each at the end. Comically, the score will reflect different things such as the probability of solving a nursery school maths book without making any errors or the amount of leaves you can catch in one minutes with a pair of chomp sticks. As mentioned, the game doesn’t take itself seriously and it’s just for fun. Coupled with the fact there are over thirty mini-games, the Make 10 Test is a nice feature if you want a few quick rounds during TV commercials.
Pretty much everything is centred around making 10.
Visually, Make 10: A Journey of Numbers doesn’t really push the DS’ capabilities, but at the same time it’s neat and very colourful. One particular thing that caught our attention were the Pixies. At first, they were just so bizarre and different that we wondered why the developers created them. As you move on and meet other characters though, it adds a certain charm and quality to the title. Being a maths title, the music is calm and not too dynamic, though there are a few tunes which will likely get stuck in your head.
While exploration and the story can get dull and unengaging, Make 10: A Journey of Numbers is still a quality title and is a nice change from Nintendo’s Training series. The game doesn’t take itself too seriously, there are over thirty mini-games to play, and the Trial Mountains presents challenge to players. That said, unless you want to brush up on your basic maths skills, there’s not a lot that will keep you interested.
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