Others say...

"too hard to use the arrow keys"
My four year old does very well with a mouse, and sometimes she needs my help. This game she just wanted me to play and watch, becuase it was too hard for her. She doesn't like it and got frustrated, I have already ordered the rapunzel as recommended by other reviewers

"Brought my daughter to tears on Christmas morning!"
If I could give this game a zero I would. The game starts out good with nice graphics and all, bt very quickly goes down hill. The child has to complete tasks to find the princesses. The first task is to make a little kitten jump and duck to catch flowers, but if you miss you loose all your flowers. My daughter tried for over 30 min. Then I tried for 1 hour, the my husband tried and my son (a game fanatic) tried. None of us could complete the task. I had to try and explain to my daughter why Santa would bring a "mean game". The purpose of the game is supposed to be fun for the child, not frustrating for the whole family. Don't buy this game and warn everyone you know not to buy it. Lets stop any more children from crying because of this awful game!

"too hard for a 6 year old, disappointing!"
This is the worst Barbie game we have seen. My six year old was very frustrated (and I was too after several attempts at helping her). She usually plays games similar to this on her own, but there was no part of this game she could play alone. The instructions are poor and the kitty catching the flower game is impossible and extremely frustrating! I wish I would have read the other reviews before purchasing this game. We are very disappointed and after several hours, I'm sure it will never be finished. I think my daughter has given up and is sorry that Santa would bring her such a hard game. Do not purchase this for a young Barbie fan, or you will be the one playing it and getting frustrated too!

"Great game"
We bought this game for my 4 year old and she loves it. We have had it for almost 6 months now and it is still her favorite game. She has played it and finished it almost 5 times now. She has many computer games and likes to visit sites on the web that have childrens games but prefers this to any other.

The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because she calls me to help her with several of the harder parts of the game (throwing flowers on the lilly pad, and catching flowers for Twila). I cant tell you how many times I have had to do these, but they only take 5 minutes and then she is back to happily playing the game. Still, its enough of an irritation for me...so I can only give the game 4 stars.

"Too hard for young gamers, annoying for older gamers"
My six year old gets frustrated often playing this game, and I know when she sits down to play it, I have no chance of getting anything else done because she'll require constant help, after which she'll usually have a complete meltdown, frustrated because she wants to play the game, but frustrated because she can't.

Activision here attempted to create a 3D game using Barbie, as she wanders around various paths collecting gems and completing tasks - major tasks that help unlock the 12 princesses in the game. In essence, this is a "platform" game that works in 3D space. Follow paths, jump over obstacles, jumps onto moving platforms and elevators, etc. (If you remember when the Mario series went from 2D to 3D, you'll understand what I'm saying.) Unfortunately, Activision chose to use the 3rd-person view, where you are looking over Barbie's shoulder (and can see her entire body), as opposed to making it 1st-person, where you would see the world through her eyes.

As a result, you have to use the arrow keys to move Barbie around, and pressing the left, right, and down arrows changes her body's orientation so that she's turning in 3D space. This is hard for a child to control, and it's even frustrating for an adult (who games quite often on a console!). You can't see the whole landscape until you turn her around and the camera follows her.

The larger issues:
1. the camera angles that follow Barbie around are terrible, it takes forever for the camera to catch up, and as a result, you spend more time trying to line Barbie up with a jump, platform, gem...and then sometimes she gets caught on an edge of something and you can't move
2. you can't really judge depth -- meaning you really don't know when to jump, and usually end up falling into water or off the edge of a cliff. Fortunatley, Barbie doesn't have any lives, so you can repeat the same sequence over and over and over and over...which is really fun
3. instructions are weak, and sometimes it's really difficult to figure out what you need to do. Other times, the narrator tells you everything you need to do -- but all of the instructions are given as one long spoken set of instructions, and you can't begin the task or activity until it has completed. So if you already know what to do, you still have to wait for it to finish.
4. there are no maps to tell you where you've been or where you need to go, and the paths that Barbie wanders are like mazes -- tough for young children. When my daughter asks for help, I don't know if she's headed in the right direction or not. Directional arrows would have been nice.
5. sometimes when you fall off a ledge, the game respawns Barbie facing in the wrong direction, so if you're not careful, you end up going back to where you started, and only then do you realize you've made a mistake
6. There are 12 princesses...so this game is quite involved, and quite long. And quite repetitive.
7. we experienced errors after finding the first princess. The error was addressed incorrectly on Activision's support site, and only after uninstalling the "full" installation from my computer, and reinstalling it in the "minimal" configuration was I able to prevent the error and continue the game. Fortunately I knew where the "save" file was stored, so my daughter didn't lose her progress.

This is a poor, poor showing for a Barbie game, and I'm really disappointed in Activision for putting out such a poorly implemented product. This isn't worth $20, and I don't even think it's worth $10. Save your child(ren) and yourself some frustration and buy something else.