"Boring" and unpolished

I tried this game with four kids, ages 6, 8, 10 and 12. All really love these kinds of games - Minecraft, Zuma, Angry Birds. None wanted to play DragonBox for more than about 20 minutes. I played it most of the way through just to see what the higher levels looked like. I think its really a stretch to claim that it teaches algebra. It does not - its simply a game of cancelling out things where they can to isolate one object. Thats just one small aspect of algebra, and its already taught in first grade math. And thats about as far as the game goes - just cancelling things out. The levels all seem to be the same. Unlike Angry Birds, there is no replay value - you dont come back later to replay it and say "yeah I remember that level, it was fun." DragonBox levels are pretty much the same thing over and over again. Letters eventually start replacing monster pictures to back up the "theyre learning algebra" claim.
Beyond the fundamental concept issue, the game is very unpolished. The music is painfully monotonous, and the graphics are uninspiring. Whats really bad, however, is that the graphics are bitmaps and do not stretch properly. Unless you want to run the game in a window (not a good idea for small kids since they will click outside and hide the game window), you will need to go to fullscreen (cmd-F). Angry Birds does this beautifully, even on 27" monitors, due to the use of vector graphics. DragonBox doesnt. It stretches out the graphics so that the objects which should be squares are now flattened rectangles with heavy pixellation. Overall, it would be very impressive work if it was developed as a high school project, perhaps in Scratch (the language from MIT). Not so impressive coming from an alleged professional programming asking for money.

GameNinjazz about DragonBox Algebra 5+