Well-designed overall with room for improvements.
MSC accomplishes what I hoped it would. It works well as a review aid and I've picked up new words and phrases, as well. The vocabulary lessons are designed well enough--each lesson presents a manageable amount of vocabulary on a theme, with a natural progression from simple words to the more complex. Much like with any Spanish primer, MSC's lessons begin with the words for numbers, colors, days of the week, and family.
The software's vocabulary is extensive and its dictionary--which can be separately accessed under options--is well-designed. You can choose to access the dictionary from the English or Spanish "side" and can search it in one of three ways; [1] you can search for a specific word by tapping on a QWERTY-style keyboard presented on the touchpad, [2] you can scroll through a list of all the vocabulary you have "mastered," or [3] you can scroll through a list of all the vocabulary in the software's library. Conjugation trees--present tense only--can be accessed through the dictionary.
There are some good design elements in MSC. Three people can use MSC separately, each with their own save file (profile). After setting up a profile and before beginning the game, there is a brief, multiple-choice "Placement test" to see how much Spanish the user already knows. If the user does well, up to the 11th lesson will be unlocked for them, allowing the user to skip lessons over vocabulary already learned. There is also a very useful option which allows you to individually adjust the volume of the music, sound effects, speech, and mic.
As a breath of fresh air, touch screen controls are very well implemented.
The menu design makes sense but would have been vastly improved with shortcuts to each of the four primary menus--learning, games, reference, and options--somewhere off to the side of each screen.
The graphics and sound are nothing special, and maybe a bit less. There is a minor graphics glitch in the minigame Spelltastic where small squares of brown appear off to the right of the screen. Also in this minigame, very long words or phrases will simply span off the screen--you will not see the first or last letters. The former does not impair gameplay while the latter does, although it never rendered the game unplayable for me. The sound could get annoying if you try to play the game too long, but I don't think it's intended to be played that way--it's more of a "practice 15-30 min a day" type of thing.
The most dissapointing point of the software is, easily, that it makes only the most minimal attempts at teaching grammar. When new words are presented they are not presented with their articles or otherwise identified as masculine or feminine. Identifying and properly using verbs, adverbs, and adjectives aren't addressed. The order of words in a sentence isn't addressed--though, oddly enough, you can still practice it though the minigames Bridge Builder.
The game only addresses present tense conjugation and not very well at that. Conjugation trees are only presented with a few of the most important irregulars. For regular verbs and the more common irregulars (ex. stem changers), you need to go to the dictionary to find the conjugation tree--which is a lot of flipping through menus. And, of course, conjugation is never actually explained to you! The only minigame which allows practice with conjugation is not unlocked until you've finished the 40th lesson, and--being the only means of practicing the skill--quickly becomes tedious.
The cultural notes are limited to one or two sentences that appear top-screen before you enter a lesson. You get a new note every few lessons. These notes are completely irrelevant to the vocabulary you are learning and completely uninteresting. It's so bad they really should have just left it out.
Still, despite these faults, my overall impression of the software is good. I wasn't expecting too much from My Spanish Coach and I was very pleasantly surprised to find a well-designed piece of software that did a pretty good job doing what I wanted it to. I think Ubisoft has something good here and hope they, or another company, improve upon the MSC model with newer games.