HELP!
| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Nintendo DS | 3.00 |
| Overall | 3.00 |
|
I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about the standard high-school clique that would make for a great strategy game. For instance, there’s enforcing rules about dress codes, whos in and whos out of the clique, battling other cliques to ensure that your clique is the number one clique…it could really work and making for an interesting. That being said, The Clique: Diss & Make Up is not the game I was hoping for in this regard. In fact, it’s not a very good game at all. The game is based around “The Clique” series of novels by Lisl Harrison, which was later turned into a direct to video movie. Though don’t worry about having any familiarity with the characters or story – there isn’t much here needed to understand the characters. The basic gist of the game sees your character starting off at a brand new school dominated by six cliques – the gothic Eccentrix, number loving Mathaletes, artistically focused Arteests, sport loving Jocks, music fans Pop Divas; and the reigning clique in the school, the Pretty Committee. And no, I’m deadly serious as to the way they’re spelt in the game. The goal of the game is to get invited by each of the cliques to their party, so you can meet up with a boy that your character likes. That’s pretty much the gist of it – the story is very sparingly told, and only told briefly at these party sequences that end each of the six chapters. To get into each clique, there are a few things you’ll need. The first is the appropriate clothing. If you don’t have the appropriate clothing, characters will practically refuse to talk to you, commenting that your clothing sucks. So you’ll need money – earnt by working various jobs in the local mall, doubling as mini-games. Most of these aren’t that great, except the one where you work in an Ice Cream parlour serving sundaes to customers; which is a great, albeit simplified, take on Midway’s 1983 arcade classic Root Beer Tapper. The jobs also pay obscenely well too – one shift that I did with the Ice Cream mini-game netted me close to $1000 in game money. The great thing here is that you can keep doing the game as much as you want, making it entirely possible to earn enough so that you can only go to the mall to buy the clique specific clothing and never have to work another day in the game. Once you have the clique approved clothing, the second thing you need to do is actually get into the clique. To do this, you need to fill up a bar by either hearing ‘juicy’ rumours and delivering them to members of the clique you want to get in, or by running errands for individual members. Most of them are fetch quest kind of things – such as go to a location and pick up an item for a character and then return to said character, delivering a juicy bit of gossip, or by achieving a certain grade average by clearing class mini-games, though that’s the only reason why you’ll ever need to do classes. Once you’ve filled up the bar enough, you get invited to the party. Rinse and repeat until you've beaten it. It’s hard to decide just what the biggest problem with the game is. The first problem is the length – the game is incredibly short. For instance, if you bought all the appropriate clothing beforehand, you can get each chapter done in less than 20 minutes, or less than 10 tops. It doesn’t help that because there’s a very specific order as to what cliques you’ll attempt to join, you can pretty much plan in advance what to get. The second problem is just the general inconsistencies and problems with the game design. I mentioned above how characters will refuse to talk to you because you’re not wearing that cliques approved clothing. Well, this also goes with errand givers. If you’re trying to work with another clique and you realize that you can finish off an errand from a previous clique, the game will refuse to let you finish off the errand. The reason? You’re not wearing the specific clothing required to talk to this character. It doesn’t make a lick of sense in the slightest – especially when the game even lets me know that I’ve finished the errand. As well as that, it’s incredibly unproductive to change into another set of clothes just to finish off an errand that doesn’t help me achieve my current goals. Visually, the game is actually quite decent. All the characters in the game are drawn in a cartoon-esque, stylished fashion, which actually suits the game quite well. The characters do look distinct enough and is overall quite pleasing. However, the 3D models for each character? Not so great. They’re kinda blurred out, and while you can tell who they’re supposed to be, aren’t quite as good looking. Aurally, the game doesn’t fare as well. Points go to the game for actually featuring more than just instrumental songs, but the problem is, most of them aren’t particularly great songs. Examples include an utterly awful rap that takes place over a song with practically no beat whatsoever, and doesn’t even fit in well with the music the rap is supposed to be over. The rest of the sound effects are decent enough, but is drowned out by the music. The Clique: Diss & Make Up is not a very good game. Not in the slightest. While it is quite nice that people not at all familiar with the Clique series can dive right in and play, pretty much any and all appeal that the game has dissipates not too long after starting the game. The fact that there’s no story, incredibly simple gameplay, only a couple of hours of actual game to play, so many inconsistencies and poor design decisions and an awful soundtrack don’t help its cause much. Though while the game does actually look somewhat decent, there are just way too many cons to actually recommend this to anyone, even its preferred audience of young girls. |
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Posted by darthhomer Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:10:39
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travo (2m)
heh heh - you spelt it wrong.