Targeting young females, Super Chicks: Make Friends. Shop. Save the World. is an isometric RPG-style game that will have gamers go on shopping trips and making friends…that is, if you can deal with the game’s programming errors.
My first impression with this game was not good at all. Not because it was a cute and fuzzy young girl game, but rather, I experienced a system crashing bug within the first 5 seconds of gameplay. When the player initially gains control of the playable character, talking to the first NPC will immediately crash the game and cause the system to shut down. I was even able to get this bug to repeat. My system forcefully restarted four times before I was able to avoid this programming glitch. Because the DIDJ loading screens take forever to load, I wasted a solid 10 minutes of my life trying to work my way around this stupid bug.
When the game isn’t crashing, players will walk around town, talking with random characters and participating in side missions. Unfortunately, the game never tells you where to go or what you should be doing. This open ended gaming structure is welcomed in current generation video games, but there at least needs to be some overall goal that you are trying to accomplish. Super Chicks just puts you in the middle of the world with no direction what-so-ever. The feeble instruction manual doesn’t help either. Without a point of reference, players will be walking around aimlessly looking for something to do.
Walking, the action that will be performed most in this game, defines the term slow and tedious. A senior citizen using a four legged walker could walk faster than the playable character in this game. Combine this fact with the lack of direction, and you have a recipe for one super slow paced game. If randomly walking around is such a major part of the gameplay, why does it have to take so long to simply reach a destination? I eventually found some roller skates for my character, but that really didn’t help with the speed issue either. Because of this fact, I find Super Chicks to be an unplayable mess.
Even tapping the hint button on the system’s hardware does not do anything. If you run into a character that has a mission objective for you, you most likely will not have the right item needed to complete it in your inventory. This is nothing short of a major game design error. If I do not have the right item to complete a mission, then why is it even offered? That is like running into Ganon without having the Master Sword or telling Fox McCloud to take down Star Wolf without his Arwing. It just doesn’t make sense and should not have been in the game. Making matters even worse, there are really long load times, characters repeat, and dialog is reused over and over.
I understand this game is for young females, but I cannot recommend this game since the entire game design is broken and beyond tedious. When a game crashes within seconds of first starting up, it is a very clear indicator that there are going to be issues later on. Go play Sonic The Hedgehog instead.
