Out of Space

 Rating: 7/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸
Ages: Mainly 8+ but younger kids can have fun with it, too. I'll explain below...

The basic premise of this game is that you and up to three of your friends are a cleaning/moving crew for a spaceship habitat company. Your job is to clean out alien infestations, furnish, and power up a space station habitat. It's harder than it sounds. The controls are simple. The game play, especially on zen mode, is pretty easy but still can cause some challenges.

Hint - it's much easier to be successful if you talk to each other as you're playing so you can coordinate what you're doing.

Younger kids can join in the fun as long as you have two more competent players handling the aliens and cleanup portion of the game. My 3yo grandson enjoys just making his character run around the spaceship with the dog.

It's bright, colorful, fairly laid-back fun for the family. It only got 7 cat faces because it can be pretty repetitive if you try to play a lot of it at a time. A couple of rounds once or twice a month seem to be plenty for us. That said, it has a lot of staying power as a fun group game.

DragonQuest Treasures

 Rating: 6/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸
Ages: 5+

I've been a fan of the DragonQuest series from the beginning. Big caveat: I've really only played I, II, and III (which are excellent games!). DragonQuest Treasures is okay, but nothing as good as those three. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

The basic storyline is pretty simple. You play as two children, you can swap which one you are playing but you can't play both at the same time, who befriend two glowing winged things, a pink cat and a green pig. They provide infodumps but not much else. They open a wormhole to their world and of course you jump through, as characters do in RPG adventures.

Their world is a series of sky islands that have been overrun with monsters and bad guys. And treasure, which for some reason keeps re-spawning. The treasures are fun nostalgic nods to previous games but have nothing to do with this game other than being a way to keep score. The game is a series of side quests to collect certain types of treasure, beat up certain monsters, collect enough of the right resources, and restore the islands to some kind of order. The monsters never go away, though.

It's fun enough, for a while, but it gets very repetitive. If you are a 100%-er who has to get EVERYTHING, don't play this. The treasure drops are pretty much random and there are hundreds of different items to collect.

Once you finish the main storyline, there are still a few side quests that open up. Most of them are okay, mostly beat up the gangs of rival pirates that are trying to steal all the treasures. I gave up on the one where I had to beat the ghost king pirate. The battle was just too hard, especially compared to the simple fighting that all the other fights had been. You get shut in an arena with the pirate king. You fight really hard and think you've beaten him, but wait! He's not really dead. He comes back bigger and stronger and full of more health. Rinse and repeat a few times. After dying several times in a row, I just gave up. When you aren't having fun, the game needs to end.

So overall, it was fun but not something I'd come back to. It's one to hand to my grandkids and let them have fun with it.