Teen Titans-style Games

A team of five, in fan hands

Every game on this hub is a fan-made or inspired title from a licensed third-party provider; none is an official product of the show, and nothing here is affiliated with or endorsed by its network or publisher. What the providers borrow is the look: a squat, bright, big-headed art style, a tower by the water, and a team of five whose silhouettes are recognizable from across the room. What they build with it is mostly puzzles. Jigsaws of the team lead the shelf by a wide margin, followed by hidden-object rooms, match boards and spot-the-difference pairs, all using fan art of the characters rather than anything from the screen. That makes the shelf far calmer than the name might suggest. A child who likes the cartoon can spend an hour here without a single fight, and the parent who set them up can walk away, which is not something every hero shelf can promise.

The label collects every title that says teen titans, and because the show belongs to the same cartoon family as several other hubs, the neighbors are close. The wider Cartoon Network-style games hub holds the fan games for the sibling shows, gumball games the most heavily represented of them, and the general hero games hub the caped titles that do not borrow a specific team. For the puzzles alone, jigsaw games and hidden object games hold the same formats with every other picture in the catalog. The sections below split the shelf the way it actually plays: the boards, the arcades and the creative corner, in order of size, and the shelf is honestly a small one, so the neighbors will be needed sooner rather than later.

Jumps, rescues and a little action

The arcade end of the shelf is where the team actually moves. The most common format is a vertical jumper: a hero bounces from platform to platform up the side of a tower, the screen scrolls upward, and a fall below the bottom edge ends the run. Others are short side-scrolling platformers with a rescue at the end of each level, where the team member you control has to reach a captured friend past a few walkers and pits, and a couple are top-down city runs where you dodge traffic and collect tokens. None of them is long. A level takes a minute, a run takes three, and the games are built for a phone as much as a desktop, with a tap to jump and a swipe to change direction. The platformer games hub and the jumping games hub hold the same formats with their own casts, and the adventure games hub has the ones with an actual story around the jumping.

There is less combat than a hero license usually brings. A few fan titles stage a swamp or city attack where you fight waves with a single button, and they are cartoon fights in the show's own register, with enemies that pop and nobody who bleeds. Even so, they are the titles to check first if the player is very young. The rest of the arcade corner is tame to the point of gentleness, and the kids games hub carries most of it a second time. A last note on what to expect: the fan platformers vary in feel more than the puzzles do. Some have a floaty jump with generous landing, others are stiff and precise, and a level that feels wrong in the first three jumps usually stays wrong, so trying two before settling on one is fair.

Categories:PlatformerAdventure

Drawing, dressing and playing on a phone

The creative corner is small but it is the part of the shelf that produces something. Step-by-step drawing lessons walk a player through a character one stroke at a time, with the guide fading as the sketch fills in; dress-up scenes hand you a team member and a wardrobe of alternate outfits; and a coloring page or two use the same fan art as the jigsaws with the colors removed. They belong to drawing games and dress-up games as much as here, and they are the entries that suit a tablet best, where a finger on the glass is a better pencil than a mouse. The jigsaws also shine on a tablet: pieces are large, the picture is bright, and difficulty is set by piece count rather than by any trick, so the same board can be a toddler's puzzle or a slow evening for an adult.

On a desktop the arcades use the arrow keys or WASD and the space bar to jump; on a phone they switch to on-screen buttons or a tap-anywhere jump, and the vertical jumpers in particular play better with a thumb than a keyboard. Nothing installs, nothing asks for an account, and progress in the longer platformers saves in the browser between sessions. The shelf suits fans of the cartoon first and puzzle players second, and it leans very young, which is faithful to the source. Players who came for the hero fantasy rather than the humor will find more of the punching under power rangers games and the wider batman games shelf, where the fan tradition is darker and the fights are the point rather than the joke.

Categories:Dress Up