Moving Day Madness Game Review

BY: BRIAN ROBBINS  |  Advergame reviews, Advergames

Bell’s Moving Day Madness is an advergame promoting Bell’s e-Move service.

Your role as the player is to move as much stuff into your new location as possible. You do this while clicking on boxes or bigger items, and shoving them through the door. You also need to fight against your lazy and unhelpful “help.”

What I liked: The game has a nice graphic feel, and the music complements it well. The animations for the characters are also good, and help bring the entire experience together.

Another huge bonus for this is the relative simplcity of controls. You play the entire game with a mouse, and never need to touch the keyboard. This ensures the largest possible audience reach for the game.

What I didn’t like: There’s a lot of things that I think are wrong with this game, and most of them come down to overall polish and execution.

When I first visited the game, it took a while to load, perhaps 15-20 seconds. This in itself is not a problem, but all I saw was a white box on screen. If there had been a loader I wouldn’t have worried, as it was I was within a half second of trying a different browser as I thought the site wasn’t FireFox friendly. This lack of loading and very jarring transitions ocurred throughout the experience, though none were as bad as the initial load (or as important as that either!)

The initial menu can also use some tightening up to make it more obvious what the user is supposed to do.

During the game itself, the hit states need to be adjusted, especially for the big items that need to be shoved through the door. Often times I would try to click repeatedly on a couch, but when it flipped onto it’s side the hit state would move, and none of my subsequent clicks would register.

The end of the game was also a huge disappointment. Instead of giving me the option to play again, I was immediately sent to a survey asking when I am moving. There’s no back button or anything else on the screen other than the survey, leaving users with nowhere to go, and thus many will probably just leave.

Overall: This could be a good game, but there are too many problems with the execution to get it there right now. The idea itself is good, the gameplay for the most part is solid, and it has a good feel. The branding is also right there throughout as the game is all about moving.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is to always make it clear to the user what they need to do. There’s numerous instances in this game where that is not the case, and I think it really hurts the overall experience.

Having said that, I’m moving soon and I’ll probably look into Bell’s e-Move service, so maybe it does work

(via Adverblog)