CornHole Game Review

BY: BRIAN ROBBINS  |  Advergame reviews, Advergames

CornHole is a game on the NabiscoWorld website, promoting Ritz Chips.

The gameplay is a bean bag toss where the player needs to throw bean bags onto a Ritz branded box within a parking lot.

What I liked: They have done a good job recreating a bean bag toss game. The physics seem realistic enough, and it works flawlessly.

I also like that it is completely mouse-driven. The 3-click throwing may be a bit confusing to very basic players, but pretty much anyone will be able to play this game without much trouble.

What I didn’t like: This is an example of yet another cheap advergame that doesn’t provide additional value to the brand. What does Ritz have to do with a bean bag toss? Very little if anything, except for all the logos that were slapped into the environment to ram the idea down the user’s throat.

They even missed the obvious (though still boring) idea of having the player toss bags of Ritz Chips instead of bean bags.

There’s also a few strange things on the interface, the most glaring of which is that at the end of the game you get a large message on screen saying: “Click ‘Quit’ to submit your score.” Why!? It is easy, and much more effective to replace that entire text (which is significantly larger and more prominent than any of the buttons), with 2 button options entitled ‘Play Again’ and ‘Submit Score’ Telling the user to click ‘Quit’ to submit their score just reeks of rushing a game out without taking the time to think through the actual user experience.

Overall: This is a great example of an advergame that should never exist. It is nothing more than a bunch of logos slapped onto a game that is completely unrelated to the brand. It doesn’t even take the most basic steps towards integrating that brand, such as having the player toss bags of chips instead of bean bags.

It is these types of games, and the short-sited thinking behind them that is going to cause serious problems for all advergame developers. Cheap half-hearted porting of existing games, just to make a quick buck by developing a “new” game for a client.