She is one of the biggest names in the world of Plastic and over the years her name has only got bigger and bigger. No, I am not talking about a washed up celebrity, which I am sure a few could actually sit quite comfortably with that description. No, I am talking about a female icon that has been the front runner of many many franchises over the years, some really successful, some not so much. If you haven’t guessed it already, I am talking about Barbie. Today we are going to be looking at one of her ventures that was not that successful at all – Barbie: Explorer.

Barbie:Explorer was released in 2001 on the Playstation 1, it was developed by Runecraft and published by Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing. When the game was released, computer games like Tomb Raider were very popular, so it was based around the concept of the sort of adventures that Lara Croft would get up to = although for a Barbie audience. As well as this they also decided to merge it with another popular type of game style and that is of the Crash Bandicoot theme. So all in all to sum up the game play it is a bit like playing a Lara Croft based game in a Crash Bandicoot level environment.

The computer game was an Action Adventure one where the aim was to go around the world and find four different pieces of treasure that would solve the mystery of ‘The Mystic Mirror’. In the computer game you would play four levels in four different places which were Tibet, Egypt, Africa and Babylon. The game finishes when you have completed all the levels and the mirror is pieced back together.

The game never received very good reviews because it was technically becoming outdated. The Playstation 2 was already out so this was a very late player to the original gaming console. Also others commented on the weird gameplay and the fact that there was a lot of ‘terible platforming’ and a really weird camera angle that made it difficult to play. It also received bad reviews because of its terrible gameplay.