hansel-gretel-epic-tales-animated-storybook

Hansel and Gretel (by Epic Tales) is a classic tale that I was happy review and share with my kids. This particular version of the storybook app is filled with great graphics and tons of animations that are on par with some of the best storybook apps out there.
Starting with the graphics, this is one of the most perfect illustrations I’ve come across while doing these types of reviews. It’s spot-on. The animations are great additions, and I actually like that my kids had to wait to “touch interact” with them until the words were read or had cleared the screen. It made them HAVE to pay attention to the story and not just “play around”…which has it’s own mode anyways.

The music and sound effects are great…each page really comes alive, and the narration is very well done. Epic Tales has a ‘storyteller’ that is central to their app…his name is Silvertongue, the dwarf. He helps to introduce the story, and narrates for those who want it. He (Silvertongue) apparently used to be quite the adventurer and traveler…and he “learned” these tales during those travels. This is a clever addition to the app, and assuming it makes its way to their other apps, will easily be a welcomed sight for my kids when he appears.

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The storybook features:
* Classical tale, original adaption
* Produced and animated by award winning animation studio
* Professional storytelling and voice acting
* 23 chapters filled with beautiful hand drawn 2D environments
* Over a 100 interactive and dynamic surprises
* Cinematic cut scenes
* Original music score and sound effects
* Intuitive navigation
* Options : Read to me, Read by myself or Play around
However, there are a few problematic details that should be dealt with, and I must bring these up.
A couple times missing/odd punctuation hindered my own reading to the kids, and one time the words didn’t fit horizontally on the screen. I also would have liked to see a way to manually pause the text as it scrolls in the “read to myself” option within the text-area. I felt I was rushing at times, and then other times it felt like it was barely able to read slow enough while reading it to my kids. Finally, the price is just a tad too high. It’s not so much that it’s not worth it, but more that many other apps (not all though) of this nature have lowered the expected price of this type of download…and unfortunately too many will pass on it because of this, and that’s a shame.
I would expect the few issues above to be fixed or improved upon quickly, as the rest of the app is seriously top of the line. If Epic Tales can do that, and keep up the quality that they have introduced here, they could easily rise to the top of the children’s interactive storybook genre.