Wednesday App Review: Choices

choices

When I was a kid I absolutely loved reading the “choose your own adventure” style books. Something about being able to control the character (and sometimes prevent them from doing something incredibly stupid) was kind of exciting to me. However, I’ve generally avoided apps that are similar as they usually seem to be aimed at pre-teen girls, and most look like in-app purchase hogs. But, this week, I decided to take the leap and try the app Choices by Pixelberry Studios. And I have to say that it wasn’t entirely what I expected. choices screenshotNow, it should be noted that I didn’t actually play most of the uber-girly romantic storylines (of which there are many) but instead chose the only fantasy option available, and the horror one, although I did play through a tiny bit of one romance-centric story just to see what it was. I’m not much into sappy romance, and it was nice to see there were some options to avoid (or engage in) romance in all the stories. The stories themselves were okay; more or less what you’d expect from an app like this, really. The fantasy story I played through allowed players to build up “prestige” in order to make decisions which otherwise might cost money. However, this didn’t seem to be a common theme, and most of the other stories locked the best decisions behind a pay wall, which was dismaying, and there was not really a reliable way to earn the diamonds for those decisions without paying money. Even more dismaying, though, was how much money it cost for each decision—I’m talking around 20 – 30 diamonds, which could set you back $2; and there were easily two to three of those per chapter. To give you perspective, the story I played had around 18 chapters. That’s a lot of money to waste on a game, no matter how you slice it. So, overall, while I did enjoy playing through the story, as it reminded me of all of those books I’d read as a kid, I cannot say I’d honestly recommend this game. It’s extremely expensive and the in-app purchases are ridiculously priced. You virtually have to do them in order to really make the kind of progress you’d like in a majority of the stories, and it actually will penalize users for not spending money in the form of terrible decisions. Regardless, it should be noted that you definitely can play this game 100% free; as long as you can resist the constant temptation to spend money, and don’t mind being funneled into what are obviously bad decisions. You can download Choices for the iPhone or Android for free.]]>

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