Game Review: Holiday Home 3D (Mobile – Free to Play)

There’s nothing like a free to play game to ruin your festive spirit and while Holiday Home 3D isn’t quite that bad, it’s still a soulless and pointless play.

Coming from developer tastypill, Holiday Home 3D sets you the joyful task of decorating your home just in time for the holiday season. Put up Christmas lights, bake some cookies, decorate the tree with ornaments, build a snowman and so on. Do this over the 12 days of Christmas, while unlocking new festive decor then do it all again.

Yes, it quickly loses it lustre and few will carry on once they’ve completed one set of 12 days. Partially because gameplay is completely unchanged, partially because all your unlocks are reset, partially because the ads are intrusive but mainly because it’s just not much fun.

Which is a real shame as the game does have strong Christmas spirit and the visuals are bright and colourful, if not a bit basic.

The simplest way to put it, is Holiday Home 3D just isn’t very good. Gameplay consists of nothing more than pressing the screen, dragging something to a specific point and occasionally, to break up the monotony, holding your finger down on the screen. Hilariously, the game seems to know how crap its gameplay is, so gives you (almost) the immediate chance to skip them, thus completing them regardless. How much fun is that?

The thing is, the rubbish gameplay is still not the thing that makes this feel so vapid, empty and soulless. No, that comes with its cheap attempts to make you watch more ads than necessary.

This comes from the festive decoration unlocks. Which, as stated above, reset after every 12 days. The thing is, there are 9 to unlock in total and each cost 300 coins to unlock. That amount of coins can take a few days (in-game) to get. Meaning, at most, over the 12 days you’re unlikely to unlock anymore than 3 which then reset at the end of the season.

So, how do you unlock all? Get watching ads. Yes, watch an ad and be gifted with extra coins which will help you unlock all the decorations. It quickly descends into an ad-watching experience rather than a game. Which, of course, you don’t actually have to do but the unlocking of Christmas decor is the only reason the game has to keep you coming back.

Now do you see why we call it soulless?