First impressions
Way back in the days before Michael Bay and Shia LaBeouf losing his marbles, Transformers was a fantastic cartoon that we enjoyed watching with our siblings when we were younger. Our brothers had many of the action figures, including Optimus Prime, which took a fair bit of wrestling to turn into that signature truck we all recognize. Yup, the Autobots were big collectibles back then, and you can still see the classic cartoons on certain channels even now.
Last week we ran into a friend of ours who asked us to review a children’s app, and so here it is.
The “Coloring Book for Boys that Love Transformers” app is a great way to get kids into coloring; it doesn’t create a mess; and if they’re not happy with their final result, they can clear it and start again.
We downloaded it and put our artistic talent to the test…all purely for scientific purposes of course.
How it works
Just as with a regular coloring book, this app offers a number of pages with lots of characters just waiting to be brought to life with “crayons.” You can swipe through all the different drawings, and once you’ve settled on one, choose your first color. There are crayon colors along the bottom of the screen ranging through the spectrum of the rainbow. Swipe through them to get to the yellows and greens on the far right.
Before you go to fill in a section of your Transformer, tap on the sharpener icon in the top right-hand corner. You can choose between three different sizes of nib. Go with the thinner one for the smaller sections, and the larger one for the big sections. On the other hand, you can do what you want – go with your vision.
If your effort ends up not resembling that vision, however, simply tap on the eraser icon and wipe what you don’t like away. You can also completely clear the page if you wish, by tapping on the “X” symbol.
The envelope symbol allows you to email or share your masterpiece with others through social media, or you can simply save it to your photo album to admire it later on.
There are 36 pages in total to tackle, including the “extra pages” with varying degrees of detail to color, and they can be used over and over again.
The only thing you can’t do easily is zoom in on the picture. If you try to do so with the usual iPad gestures, you’ll end up with a stripe of whatever color you last chose across the screen.
When we played
It didn’t take long for us to realize that our dainty, yet adult, fingertips would have us at a disadvantage with this app, particularly when it came to fiddly little sections of our chosen drawing. We kept going outside the lines, but luckily we found the eraser most useful. Maybe a stylus would improve our skills in the future.
Our friend’s 4-year-old kid had a great time with it, although time will tell whether he’s a Picasso or not.
Final thoughts
This is a great, inexpensive app that might keep your children busy for quite a while, and that makes it worth its weight in gold. Our only beef? What the heck is with the title? Why would one assume that only boys love Transformers? Does that mean there’s a “Coloring Book for Girls that Love My Little Pony” app out there? We loved Transformers as much as our brothers. Now where are those crayons…
Pros: Inexpensive. Easy to use. Lots of designs and colors.
Cons: Sets the women’s movement back decades.
Coloring Book for Boys that Love Transformers
Cost: $1.99
Seller: Belinda Terry
Devices: iOS and Android
Rating: E for Everyone
Three stars
Related Videos
