Nukezilla Review: Phone Story (Android)

Some games attract attention more for the controversy surrounding them than their actual quality. Phone Story is one of those games.

Best known for being banned from Apple’s App Store, the game is now available on the Android Market.

The game first takes you through a series of mini-games, with narration, that detail many of the horrible socio-economic problems associated with smart phone production.

The mini-games themselves are all playable, but not particularly interesting. Most of them are essentially slightly worse versions of old arcade games. There is very little challenge in playing through the Story Mode, but the point of it is to inform you why you are a bad person for supporting the technology you are playing the game on instead of to entertain.

There is also the Obsolescence Mode, where you play the game in a seemingly never-ending loop, each time moving up in speed. You also upgrade to the latest and greatest phone, moving from beta to 2.0 to 3G, and so on. It makes its point, but like the old arcade games it is mimicking, the only difference in gameplay is an increase in speed until it kills you.

Presentation is about what you would expect from an indie smart phone game. Graphics aim for an 8-bit feel, but with a higher pixel count than any 8-big system could really handle. The sound effects are minimal, and the background music is fitting for the heavy-handed documentary style the game is shooting for.

As a game, Phone Story is nothing special. They only ask a dollar for it, from which they pledge to donate their profits to charities and organizations that seek to make changes to many of the practices the game addresses. But really, if you want to help, I would just visit their website, donate to said charities, and watch all ten minutes of the game when someone inevitably uploads a play-through to YouTube.