Subaru Impreza Shakedown Advergame Review
Subaru Impreza Shakedown is an advergame and contest promoting the Subaru Impreza. The main gameplay consists of you driving one of various Impreza models around the course for the best time. The best times will win prizes at the end of the promotion.
What I liked: The overall site design and site philosophy seems to try to drive the player to actually race without pushing them through too much advertising. The site is obviously branded Subaru throughout but it feels natural and unobtrusive. They have also done a good job integrating short video clips to help drive home the experience for the Subaru racing team.
What I didn’t like: My biggest gripe is the overly intensive registration process that must be completed before you can even race once. (I’ve complained about this before). This site isn’t quite so bad because they never imply that you can play without registering. However, their registration is extremely intrusive forcing the user to not only enter their name and e-mail, but report information about their current car, and plans to buy. My guess is that they will either lose almost all potential visitors at this step, or they will receive a lot of Joe Blow registrations.
My other problem is that the game and site are buggy. When I first registered I could not get back in to actually race. In fact, I had to completely leave the game section and come back before I could race. Then, during the race itself I had to complete several laps before it actually counted me as finishing.
Overall: The overall mission and direction for this site is solid, but it is getting killed by a really poor decision on registration, and then further hurt by some problems in the execution. My guess is this will not be a very successful campaign for Subaru.
Update: It appears that the registration might not be forced, but may have been either a bug when loading or possibly some issue with the Flash 7 player. At any rate, you can actually race without registering which is a good thing.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 at 1:25 am and is filed under Advergame reviews, Advergames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 3rd
2005 at 1:39 am
Funny. I would never even look at it after hearing about the registration pains. I hate them and it just turns me off to the product in a BIG way. A major negative IMO.
November 3rd
2005 at 11:36 am
I don’t know what you are talking about. I just played this game and I didn’t have to register for anything.
November 3rd
2005 at 11:37 am
And by the way, it’s an awesome game! I can’t believe they pulled this off in Flash!!!!
November 3rd
2005 at 11:43 am
Interesting. I just tried it again from the office, and it looks like you can play without registering. Perhaps it’s a compatability problem as I have Flash 7 at home, but Flash 8 here? There are definitely options available now that I did not see last night.
Having said that I’m having other problems with the site today, in that it isn’t loading about half the time. Probably due to the traffic that it’s getting as this site starts to make the rounds.