Campus Life™: Fashion Girl IOS Mobile Game Review

So today, while working on another project of mine, which I’m not quite ready to announce here just yet, I came across an old app I used to love and be so addicted to. That app is Campus Life by Pocket Gems. I was looking for a way to blog about the app on my new site, but hint: since the project only covers android apps, I couldn’t blog about Campus Life.

For some unknown reason, Pocket Gems removed Campus Life from the android store about 5 years ago. Meanwhile, the Itunes version is still going strong with new features, updates, special events, and content added frequently. I wonder why they would want to alienate a large percentage of their players and thus lose revenue. I have been an IOS user for about 3 years now. So I had no idea this app was no longer available in the Google Play store.

Anyways, Campus Life is a really great game!!! It allows you to customize your first character and move her into an empty sorority house. You have to get other girls to join your sorority by hosting events around campus and of course throwing parties. You can buy more land and expand and decorate your house. You can have pets, you can compete against other real players in fashion shows, and get limited time event rewards, including clothing, girls, and furnishings. There’s even boys you can date. You can also craft your own clothes too! Campus Life is jam packed full of features and content!

I haven’t played in about 6+ months now, but it’s still one of my favorite mobile games just because of the sheer amount of things you can do!

Score Card:

Title: Campus Life: Fashion Girl

Publisher: Pocket Gems

Platform: IOS

Click here to get the game on your Iphone or Ipad

Genre: Dressup Game with City Building and Dating Sim aspects

Geeky: 5/5 – With so many different things to do, from designing your campus, to recruiting girls, dressing up, dating, making your own clothes, throwing parties, completing quests and events, collecting limited exclusive rewards, studying and improving your girls’ careers, virtual pets, and online multiplayer fashion showdowns, this game has it all. It’s far more than “just” a dressup game. Probably one of the most feature rich dressup games on the market, still to this day, and with a history of 4+ years and counting now.

Sweetie: 5/5 – The dresses and accessories in the game are very cute. There’s a huge variety of content, so you can be sexy, sweet, a bookworm, a jock, a goth, or anything in between. You can dye your hair, put on makeup, even select your skin tone. New content is added constantly. The art style is more westernized and not as anime-ish as I like, but it makes up for it in gameplay features and amount of items.

Gameplay: 7/10 Throughout this review I keep praising the vast array of activities built into this app. But we’ll list them one more time here. When the game starts you’re given your first girl for free. You select from a few options for hair/eyes/skin and clothing. You’re then thrust into a proceduraly generated game world. I know it’s proceduraly generated because I used to play on both IOS and Android back in the day and had 2 different accounts and 2 very different game worlds. Proximity to beaches, animals, forests, and other features were completely random. You could rescue the animals if you reached them, or build your house on the beach, etc.

You start with a pretty empty house and are walked through a tutorial where you buy your first clothing, furnishings, and recruit your first girl. Recruiting girls lets you meet new girls who move into your house and you can dressup these new girls as well which adds to the dressup fun.

But as I’ve said, Campus Life is much more than a dressup game. Your girls all have their own likes and dislikes, and to recruit them you have to interact with them and discover and talk about those interests. Certain furnishings can help boost the likely hood that a girl will want to join your sorority as well. Afterall, who wouldn’t want to stay in a nice place?

Later in the game you unlock even more features. Guys start coming over and you can date them, pairing them off with one of the girls in your house.

But the funnest features are the fashion contests where you play with other players, or the ability to craft and wear clothing that you make from raw materials that you gather.

I do have to subtract a few points for the game’s performance. It is very very slow to load, especially once you have a lot of rooms in your house and/or a lot of girls or furniture, etc. Everything when you first import a saved game to a new device, is an hour glass for a very very long time, sometimes more than an hour, depending on your internet connection speed. This performance issue is a huge draw back because while items are hourglasses they cannot be equipped, worn, used, nor interacted with. Things aren’t quite as slow on subsequent plays because it keeps a lot of that information probably in the cache of your Iphone or Ipad.

If these performance issues were fixed, Gameplay would easily be a 10/10. As it stands right now though, the most I can offer it is a 7.

Story: 1/10 – There really is almost no story at all in this game. Sometimes the events or characters will try to present some type of story, but, meh, it’s not very good. There’s no overaching plot to drive the story forward. The lack of a story is probably why I go periods of months on end without wanting to play the game again.

Characters: 7/10 – While the characters have no value from a story perspective, it is interesting that there are many different styles of characters to recruit, and they each have their own personalities, such as sporty or geeky or girly, etc. After awhile though, many of the girls start to look alike, there aren’t enough variations or details to make the girls really unique.

Graphics: 10/10 – although it’s not anime, it is still bright and vivid with smooth animations and a fantastic style. While the girls are not very unique, they make up for it with a ton of unique furnishings, clothing items, and accessories that differentiate and define your unique sense of fashion.

Music: 5/10 – The music was just average. I would say it’s about what you could expect from a mobile game.

Overall: 40/60 67% D+ “Average Game for Girls”

Note: if you ignore the lack of story, it becomes a 49/60 which would make it an 82% or B- “Very Good Game for Girls”. So if you don’t mind games without a central story, please do check this one out. 🙂

 

Read More: itunes.apple.com

Description

Run the most fashionable sorority on campus!Recruit fashion geniuses, party superstars and student celebs to build the most stylish sorority around! Throw amazing events for your members, from fun study sessions to dazzling sorority formals. Live the campus life you’ve always dreamed of!Collect […]