LADYBUG ZEE

A ladybug helps a friend and learns to fly.

Ladybug Zee, a cartoon critter who wears high-heel red boots for some reason, wants to help her caterpillar friend, Mony, by collecting leaves to eat. What follows is a soggy trek through different locales including a corn field and a swampy bog, but it’s an uninspired time riddled with typos (“Find six peaces [sic] of the map and put them together and you will find food for your friend”), badly formatted quotation marks and wan puzzles. These include a matching game, a jigsaw-style map puzzle and a "Frogger"-style challenge that’s become shorthand in children’s apps for, “We’ve run out of ideas.” The illustrations and rudimentary animation are flat and uninteresting, and the text if full of garbled sentences such as, “But now morning is coming, sun is already up in the sky and it is time for her to wake up.” By the time Mony transforms into a butterfly and Zee learns to fly with the help of a counting game, the lack of inspiration in the story makes the quick wrap-up ending that follows very welcome

Some younger kids will enjoy the story, which briefly branches off in three directions before coming back together, but many storybook apps do the same kind of thing much better.