Since 2002, when CoolCamels was officially released, there have been a combined three million camels created on their Hungarian, German, and English-based sites. CoolCamels has its own retail store and a magazine, both of which are based in Budapest, Hungary.

The site originally being in Hungarian proves to be a problem for the English version of the site. There are multiple places throughout the site that have poor translations, and also some areas things aren’t translated at all. There are also numerous typos throughout the site, with even one area spelling the sites name incorrectly (CoolCammels).

The layout of CoolCamels shows camels participating in many different activities, such as sunbathing, parachuting, and skateboarding; all of which are “tricks” that can be learned by your camel. Some tricks are small minigames such as kicking a coconut, and others are a profile image for your camel. The layout seems to have some coding mistakes as well, since when you click the menu image for a certain area of the site you are sometimes sent to a page you are not looking to go to. To assure you are visiting the page you want you must look at the progress bar to see what page you are going to view. The graphics on the layout are quite poor, as are the graphics on the entire site.

The camels seem to have very little work put into them; I would definitely say they are not of good enough quality to base an entire site around. When creating your camel for the first time you have the option of either a dark brown or light brown coat. You also choose your camel’s gender, which if you choose female the male camel’s image just gains a pink hair bow.

There isn’t quite much to be said of a plot of CoolCamels. I guess you could say there is a “goal” to the site though, and that is simply to keep your camel healthy, win Camel Points, and increase your camel’s level.

In order to keep your camel alive you must monitor their weight and mood. If your camel’s weight and/or mood get down to 0% (100% being the maximum), then they are considered unhealthy, but as far as I know they cannot die. If your camel does have low health are you do not have food for it, you can pay one date, the site’s currency.

There are many different ways to increase Camel Points including: logging on each day, feeding your camel new foods, allowing your camel to reach adulthood, and learning tricks. Just like with humans, camels sometimes like to spice up their diet. So when you feed your camel a food it has never had before you earn camel points. Taking the “final exam” determines whether or not your camel becomes an adult. The exam consists of questions from the tutorial, which explains passwords, sections of the site, etc. If you pass the test, your camel becomes an adult, if you fail the test you must try again the next day.

Your camel’s level is based on the number of Camel points it has. Each level has its own title ranging from “Colt” as the lowest level and “The Galactic” as the highest. When you first start you have 0 Camel Points, making you a colt, to achieve the title of “The Galactic” you must obtain 20,000 Camel Points.

As I began writing this review I was planning to give the site a 5 for safety; based on the fact that they have online staff, report features, block lists, and filters on their 3-D chat and mail. It was then that I noticed they have another feature of chat, called a Message Board which scrolls across the top of the screen.

I glanced up from what I was doing when I noticed the following post on the message board: “Horny boy looking for dirty girls. 16 or 17 would be best.” I certainly do not think a site “… mainly for kids and teenagers…” should allow that sort of thing to be posted on their site. I am not sure if they simply do not have a filter on the message boards, or if the filter did not catch it, but that certainly should not go through for everyone to see.

Since you are not asked your age during registration everyone has access to mail, 3-D chat, and the message board. Based on their lack of a functioning filter on the message boards, this could potentially be a very large problem for CoolCamels.

CoolCamels has four games in their Gaming Zone: Reversi, Scorch, Magic Balls, and Go-Moku. Regardless of what I tried, I could not seem to get the games to load. I tried multiple browsers, but still, the games just showed up as white screens. I also asked another user if they were able to access the games, and they said they were experiencing the same problems. I’m not quite sure if the games were down for everyone, or just a selected few, but when you only have four arcade games on your site it seems that you would make it a high priority to make sure the games you have are working.

There are also tricks you can teach your camel that could be classified as a game, such as Kick a Coconut. I could not get an exact number of tricks that are interactive, but I would guess that number to be around fifty. The trick games are not quite what I would consider to be entertaining, but I guess some people may still consider them as games.

There are many different ways for users to interact with each other such as message boards, mail, 3-D chat, regular chat, and also camel caravans (their version of guilds/clubs.)

The message boards, as I said earlier, do not seem to have a working filter and the overflow of obscenities makes a person not even want to use them. I did use the message board once for the purpose of writing this review though. You have many options with your message such as smilies, animations, text color, and background color.

The mail system is a bit of a pain to use, and I wouldn’t exactly want to use it any more that I absolutely had to. I received several mails about a number guessing game that I had lost, as usual, but that is the only mail I got other than a greeting mail.

With 3-D chat your camel enters a room and you can walk around, talk to other camels, and etc. Quite a few times when I logged on the chat itself was down. The only time I got the 3-D to work there were 20 people in the room, yet no one was actually actively chatting. They also have a regular chat. When I visited it there were 11 members in the room, all of which were extremely friendly and actively chatting as well.

Caravans were also down during my visit. You could view the caravan via the caravan center search, but when you click the link to go the actual front page of the caravan you are greeted by the message well-known to CoolCamel members: “This page does not exist.” That message was not just on one page, but every single caravan I visited. There is forum, which you can get links to from other users on the chat, but that’s about all the caravan has; a forum and a flag.