Review of the game Cents City created by Skill-Life
Rating: 
About Cents City
Cents City is a first-person adventure game that can be played in a Flash-enabled web browser. It is designed to educate players about managing their money. I only accessed the free demo of this game for this review which means I only had access to a small amount of game content. I have assumed that the developers would show their best content in the demo. I considered purchasing a premium subscription for the purposes of this review but the website indicates that this service is not available yet so I am assuming that it may still be in beta stages of development.
The player begins by choosing a mentor to guide them through the game. The mentor gives the player quests and guides them through each step of the quest.
My Opinion
I had high hopes for this one. On first impressions, the graphics look great. The quests look really exciting. It gave a much better first impression than Celebrity Calamity. After playing both games, I think Celebrity Calamity is a far superior game. I have outlined my likes and dislikes below.
Likes
Here is what I liked about the game:
- 2D graphics are of high quality
- Interesting and quirky game characters
- Quest format is a nice idea
- Voice over artists are high quality and engaging
- Offes a wide variety of interesting cartoon characters to act as player mentors
- The game has a number of interesting locations to visit.
Above: Cents City has high quality 2D graphics
Above: The game features some quirky characters.
Dislikes
- Gameplay is linear – there are all sorts of cool places to visit but you have to do things in the order mandated
- Contains some stereotypical characters such as a French chef (although they are entertaining)
- Game mechanic is mostly stimulus video followed by quiz questions. My belief is that games such as this should have the maths as the mechanic – it should not be an add-on. Celebrity Calamity and Zoombini Island Odyssey are examples of maths games that do this much better.
- All text displayed in the game should also use be read to the player using character voices to help those with low literacy.
- The game narrative is not logical. For example, your first task is to get your PIN to access your bank account. For some strange reason, in order to do this the player has to go to the Eiffel tower where a French chef plays you a video on how to manage your money. He then tells you to click on the elevator to get your PIN. When you click on the elevator, a series of quiz questions are asked that check your understanding of the stimulus video that the chef played you. If you answer all of the questions right, then you get your PIN. There is no relationship between clicking on an elevator door and getting a PIN for a bank account. I think the narrative needs to be much more meaningful and should match the mathematical content better.
- Some of the information that the game asks you to remember is not meaningful and it is not required. For example, after the player goes to the Eiffel Tower and gets their PIN for their bank account, they have to go to the bank to open an account and deposit their pay check. If the player forgets their PIN, there is a button that the player can press to say that they forgot it. Instead of telling the player to go back and find it out again or giving them a hint as to what the numbers are, the game puts the PIN in for you and simply says, “please remember it next time”. If the game does not treat the information it gives you as important and use it in a meaningful way, I’m not sure why the player should treat it as important. Game interfaces should promote recognition not recall. However, this is a maths game, so it is ok if the player has to recall some meaningful mathematical information that will help them with their mathematics but I wouldnot say that remembering a PIN is in that category.
Image Attributions
All images used in this review are screenshots taken from the game Cents City. These were used for review purposes. If you are the copyright holder of these images and wish for them to be removed, please leave a comment on this blog entry.