Surviving High School '08 Mobile Game

Surviving High School has to be one of the most addicting games that I've played this year. It's full of surprises, mini-games, and you basically get to decide what happens to the characters. You even get your own character to start off with, naming him or her whatever you would like and deciding what kind of person they are going to be. Throughout the game, you can name and influence a couple of other characters and their relationships with each other.

There is a specific way that you have to play each episode so that you get a perfect score. Perfect scores give you perfect endings, which is important because the creators of the game have already set everything up the way that it should go. Getting a perfect ending gets you the ending that the characters are supposed to have so that the story will match up throughout each episode. In that sense, you don't have much input and something good will happen to a character that you don't like or something bad to a character that you do like whether you want it to or not. Everything changes though, so if something doesn't happen the way that you wanted then just keep playing.

In the earlier episodes, getting a perfect score doesn't mean much. If you got close to perfect, then the scenes will play out correctly. However, after the first few chapters, you start getting bonus scenes for picking all of the right answers. These bonus scenes are usually a clue to the next week's episode, but sometimes are just a funny little skit of the characters.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of this game is that it is put into different episodes. It is like a television show where you get to pick the characters and situations. The unique part of this game is that you can't play it all at once. You have to wait a week for a new episode to be released and then spend an insane amount of time trying to get a perfect score just so you can get a sneak peak at next week's episode.

You have to be sure that you win all of the little mini-games throughout the episodes in order to get a perfect score. This is not at all hard in most cases. The mini-games are a little bit on the boring side though. At first it is okay, but after a while it gets way too repetitive. Centerscore could have created mini-games that are a lot more enjoyable.

I believe that Surviving High School could have been done a little better graphically, but then again I couldn't imagine it any other way. The storyline is interesting enough that you don't really stop to think about the quality of the graphics. You just have to know what happens next.

Surviving High School '08 is still producing episodes into 2009 so it doesn't look like an '09 version will be released anytime soon. A new cast of characters and ideas would be a fresh change though to all of us who have been playing this game all year. This is one of the few mobile games that has enough game play to last you a long while. Even after you finish playing, you can go back to the beginning and change your character's name and personality to play through all the episodes again a little differently. This game is one of my favorite mobile games by far and I completely recommend it.