Surviving High School

Surviving High School is a rather interesting title which gives us all a taste of some of the more flamboyant displays of teenage life in the USA.

You play a part of a non-academic and pretty unfit guy who you can name as you wish. Instead of doing sporting challenges and testing your maths or chemistry knowledge, it focuses more on the less educational side of school life… some may say it’s extra-curricular!

The game breaks into different core games, like dissing your opponents by rhyming words to complete phrases. Sometimes this is by reading the passage of conversation you exchange with your rival, and other times it involves matching words by pressing the ‘ok’ key at the right time.

The rhythm game works in the same basic way as before with the rhyming word game. You have multiple notes which spin and by hitting the ‘ok’ key at the right time, you’ll be rewarded by winning the round.

The game starts out with you being a little rusty at these games and your high school nemesis stealing your crown. So you’re down to do some investigative research to find all the dirt you can on this guy by any means necessary. You get to ask his mum (mom) and find some information out, or you can hound his sister or do some work at school to try and uncover more info which you can use to your advantage. Not only do you have to take care of him, but you also have to try and win your girlfriends’ heart back (you’ll start to uncover flash-back scenes which fills in some of the details).

A little like Monkey Island crossed with Bully, you have some multiple choice answers to develop the game. Although it’s tempting to zip through all the speech bubbles you will need to pay attention to get the best result – by doing so, you’ll influence the ending in the game (there are actually several different endings so to get the most out of it, you should play it several times).

Ultimately there’s a lot to this game and strikes up a surprisingly good balance between interactive options and an interesting story (which unravels due to the way you play the game). There is a lot going on and it will give you so many reasons to keep playing until you’ve unlocked all the possible endings.

So in brief, this game is certainly quite fun to play and has a lot of variety to choose from. The animations are quite comic-book in style and the story’s interesting and certainly could compete for many of the teen flicks you see on TV. You’ll get quite a few hours worth of play from this title and if you enjoy puzzle solving but with a modern and slightly edgier twist, then this is certainly a game worth paying more attention to.

Rating 84%

Positives

Good plot(s) and fun to interact with

Quite good graphics

Multiple endings

Different mini-games to play

Negatives

Quite a lot of words and few activities other than pressing the ‘ok’ button repeatedly through all the speech bubbles (which gets repetitive)

Not lots of variety between the mini-games