Reaches the young target market well - gives you an interactive house and plenty of activities to do with the cute babyz
Sound: There is a problem I noticed with the sound where sometimes it just disappears and you must restart the DS for it to come back. Other than that the sounds are just general baby gaga, and crying sounds - self-explanatory.
Replay Value: I would say there is a good replay value, as aswell as a storyline there is also a Nintendogs thing going on where you can do a variety of things with the babyz.
Gameplay: Basically you play as a teenage girl who has to babysit lots of "babyz". Every day the parents drop off the babyz at your house, the same babyz will come round often so you get to know them and their parents. Your aim is to keep the babyz happy and content until their parents come and pick them up later in the day.
You can take the babyz all over the house - bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen and garden. There are different activities that can be done in each of these rooms.
Bathroom - Here you can give the babyz a bath, bathing the babyz is very interactive and done via the touch screen, you use different objects for different things; a face cloth for the babyz face, a sponge for the body and a hairbrush for the hair.
Bedroom - Here you can put babyz to sleep in their cot, a minigame must be done to get the baby to sleep - it involves rocking the cradle at a steady pace, it is quite hard at first but you will get used to it after a while. Again it is done with the touch screen.
Also you can dress the babyz up here in either costumes (e.g. wild west) or specific clothes (dresses, tops, pants, socks, hats, diapers). This is quite fun as there is a wide selection of clothes and the babyz will actually wear them wherever they go.
Living Room - Here you can play with dozens of toys with the babyz. As you advance through the game you will acquire more toys from both your grandma who sends you them in the mail, from parents and from buying them. Each toy has a different minigame, you must fill the babyz "happiness meter" before the time is up. For example playing with the rattle involves shaking it in circles, while keeping the rattle within the moving spotlight. And playing with the bubble blower requires you to blow into the microphone correctly. Some minigames are quite hard and clunky though, some which I still don't understand - getting the minigames wrong can have disastrous effects, as the babyz will get upset and their parents can arrive to collect them at any moment. If the baby is unhappy then the parents will comment on it and won't give you as much money.
You can also play with musical instruments in the living room such as the piano and drums. However the minigames for the instruments are very confusing, it took me about 10 minutes to discover how to actually start the game, and once I started the music game I was getting 0 points despite touching the screen at the right time. Unfortunately a lot of the minigames are like this, poorly designed and near to impossible, your babyz will start crying if you do badly which is furiating!
Kitchen - Here is where you feed the babyz. It is done by taking food out of the fridge and dipping a spoon into the food pot - all done by the touch screen. You must then play yet another minigame (tracing over a line) to get the baby to accept the food, you must also blow into the microphone to cool down the food if it is too hot. You must continue doing this until the baby is full enough... which can become tedious.
You can also cook meals in the kitchen, similar to how it is done in games like Cooking Mama.
Garden - You don't unlock the garden until later in the game, here you can push babyz on the swing until they are happy. You can also plant seeds.
Each baby in the game has different likes - for example they may like to wear particular clothes (dresses, tops) or play with particular toys (rattles), this information is stored on the computer for you to view.
Once the game day is over, and night comes, you can do whatever you want until you go to sleep. This means you can catch up on the house chores - such as hoovering, lawn mowing and dish washing, which is again done through minigames.
Basically the game is a bunch of minigames, which purpose is to keep the babyz happy. You acquire money from your babysitting duties, which can be spent on buying furniture, paint, baby clothes and baby toys. However, money takes a while to get so choose what you buy carefully!
The game definately gets tedious quickly looking after the babyz, and there's no way of telling when the parents will arrive to pick their babyz up so you could spend a while just waiting for them to arrive. I think the game is a bit too hard to keep the babyz happy considering the target market, although if the babyz aren't happy it doesn't have much effect on the game - you still get to look after the babyz, dress them up and play with them, which is pretty much the point of the game.
Babyz is extremely interactive, takes full advantage of the touch screen and is similar to Nintendogs except with more games. However I would have liked to see some kind of voice recognition as in Nintendogs, and possibly a WiFi mode where your babyz can meet (although this has yet to be seen in any pet DS game). Also the games should be explained more clearly and thyey should not be so hard.
In my opinion this game is good for 8 - 15 year olds as long as they don't mind the sometimes-difficult minigames, I've given it a 7.5 for innovation.