I had never heard of Crazy Machines before, and I had never heard of Viva Media before either, but when I first looked at Crazy Machines, I was excited. I always loved building things when I was younger, from legos, and k’nex to Lincoln logs, and I thought this could be a great virtual building experience.

The object of the game is to use all sorts of different items to get your machines to work. There are over 100 items in all that you can use. There are 2 main modes in Crazy Machines, one is the Inventors Training Camp, and the other is the Inventors Lab. In the Inventors Training Camp, there are 101 different puzzles for you to solve. After each puzzle you solve, not only are you progressing through the game, but this mode also acts as a tutorial for the different parts and items that you will find in the game.

I found myself having to bounce ping pong balls off of mouse tails for the mice to run into frogs, so the frogs could jump onto lifts to reach the designated tower and complete the mission. Some of the missions in the Inventors Training Camp are extremely simple, like making the ping pong ball hit the robots in the head which would make the robots move, to pretty difficult missions involving having to place magnets around a bucket that was floating in the air so the bucket would not fall to the ground.

Inventors Lab is where the real fun begins. You have all sorts of items at your disposal to build puzzles and then see how it all plays out. Just like the toy Domino Rally from so long ago, you can build all sorts of contraptions, click the button and watch your masterpiece at work. This game is great for multi player action as well, where you and your friends can either work as a team to solve the puzzles in Training Mode, or each of you can build a puzzle and then bet on how long it will take someone to solve it.

This is also a great piece of educational software, that all schools should have on their computers, because not only will it be fun for children, but it helps work the mind at the same time.

Graphically the game has a CGI feel to it. All of the objects vaguely remind me of the Toy Story movies. The sound is pretty bad, except for the background music in the beginning of the game. The sound effects could have been shored up a bit, as several times the sound effects were louder then the instructional voice over, so it was hard to hear the “Albert Einstein” esque figure in the background. Other times however, I was glad that the sound effects were able to drown him out, because having him pop up every single level got annoying fairly quickly.

Also I don’t know who edited the game but whoever did needs to do a better job. One of the levels had me move soccer balls into a tank like structure, but the instructions on screen told me to move the footballs. Now I know in Europe soccer is called football, but when I dragged the mouse over the soccer ball, it flashed as a soccer ball not a football. It’s almost like it was made in Europe with Americans adding the details to each item, that’s why there was a cross between names.