After many years of waiting,we have had our biggest sneak peek yet. We now have the opportunity to pre-register for the game which will launch in 2017. Whether it be the poor design or critical bugs to Club Penguin Island, let’s review the website!

Let’s start with basic statistics. I doubt that I am the only one who has experienced very slow loading time for Club Penguin Island, which is very disappointing seeing how there isn’t even that much content on it. To prove this, I decided to use a website called ” GTmetrix” which gives me the speed results of the website. I compared it to the current one.

This is actually really appalling. Club Penguin Island has a very limited amount of content but takes much longer to load than the current Club Penguin website. I’m hoping that this will change very soon though!

Let’s have a look at the design of the website. The first thing we see is a commercial which takes up all of the page. However, if we scroll down, we see…bits of the commercial as pages?

I do believe that there is a reason they’ve done this, but that will be discussed in a future video. I just don’t like how they’ve chosen to feature parts of the advert with two sentences of text when you watch the video.

This is the website which new players will visit before choosing whether or not to download the app. If they literally only put a few seconds of work into what can be done on the island, that won’t make new players want to download the app. Here’s an example of the activities page.

There’s nothing better than getting out there and trying new things! Dive the deep waters, explore untamed terrain—even check out the pirate ship. Take on new challenges every day.

After three years of waiting, that’s the best they can come up with? Anyway, as I was saying, when you have the main commercial, why make six pages just sharing bits of the commercial without going into detail about it? The team has some really talented writers, and I really think this needs to be updated. If this is the best that Disney can do, I’m disappointed.

The page for parents looks amazing! It features points which are completely true about Club Penguin and I think that the team really did a great job at getting that through to parents of younger children. An interesting thing to note is that there’s no mention of charity or Coins for Change, which is something the team usually stresses that exists on our island.

It might be too early to call, but an end to Coins for Change and Global Citizenship altogether would be devastating. They’ve done so much to help people and animals in Haiti, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya, India, and China.

Bugs. There is an extremely major one with the pre-registration system on Club Penguin Island. We were informed by the team that we would be able to keep our names, but turns out that a lot of penguins can’t. For some, when entering their correct password, the system thinks it is wrong. Others have their name already taken, even though it’s the same name that they currently own and some have their name appear with lots of numbers. Megg has addressed these bugs on the blog.

The problem is that there is no method to change your username. I literally missed the button by less than a centimetre (not even exaggerating) and now I need to live with the consequences of having my name as “Torres126” rather than “Torres 126”. Hopefully the team will change them for us.

Despite Megg addressing it, players were really unhappy when it got announced, and many still are today.

This is ridiculous. Something is preventing me from pre-registering with my current Disney account. What the heck. @clubpenguin

— Tech70 (@Tech70CP) November 18, 2016

Not being able to register for the new game is really concerning, and some popular penguins believe that their name has already been taken by an impersonator. This definitely needs to be fixed, however Megg said the team are working on it so flippers crossed!

The way I’m going to rate it is giving each thing I’ve talked about a score. The score will vary on how important I think it is.

+With the continuation of the Online Safety campaign, the website stresses information about safety to parents and kids alike in a creative way 

(9/10)

+An exciting advert appears on the page, but for me, sound doesn’t always play

(6/8)

-An extremely buggy pre-registration system which has caused lots of frustration

(3/9)

-Articles are just smaller sections of the advert with an not much detail and just a few sentences 

(1/5)

-Poor load times

(0/3)

TOTAL: 19/35 – 54%

This is rather disappointing, but hopefully the team takes this feedback on board before Club Penguin Island goes live. Remember, this is simply a review of the website itself. I’ll have many more reviews up soon, including some on the adverts as well as a discussion on the beta-testing. I also hope to release an interview next week.

Waddle on!