Game Review: Brexit! (Mobile – Free to Play)

Second in the little series of games attempting to cash in on the British decision to leave the EU is the game simply known as Brexit!. Brexit! is developed by Jordic Invest Ltd and published by On-5. It is also another game that has not bothered t0o hard to make a fun, clever game. Instead focusing on pushing the developer’s own political views in a bog standard package.

While Brexit! is a pretty game to look at, it is about as superficial as a game can get. Beauty is only skin deep – scratch beneath the surface here and you find a shallow and unintelligent framework that remains fun for a very short time.

The premise of the game is simple. You control a London bus, a common theme in these games, as it progresses down a motorway. You are driving towards oncoming traffic which represents different countries of the EU. Presumably meant to portray the difficulty the UK will have leaving the EU – like driving in to oncoming traffic.

You swipe your bus either to the left or to the right to avoid the traffic rushing towards you. It comes in the form of all different types of vehicles like cars, buses and trucks. Occasionally this traffic will indicate and switch lanes at the last minute to try and catch you out. It is a trick that works well and will often be the reason your run ends. Especially when their are a chain of lane changers one after the other.

That is it for game play – there is nothing else, no different modes and no different options. There is a leaderboard, if you are connected to it. Mine never worked once.

Musically, it is fine, just a standard little upbeat tune plays constantly. That is overlaid with the sounds of the traffic, engines and horns blowing. There is a single in-app purchase available in the form of ad removal for £0.99. There are plenty of ads but for the little replayability the game has to offer, I wouldn’t bother buying this. You will be deleting the game long before the ads become intolerable.

So, as a game, for 5 or 10 minutes, it is fine. After that, you will be bored and it is unlikely to be the sort of game you will just return to occasionally as there are much better endless runner styled games out there.

For all of that though, the worst part of the game for me comes in the little political statements made during game play. As the bus drives up the road, speech bubbles appear beside it. The same happens as the traffic drives to stop you – little statements appear. This would be fine if they were clever little retorts, but also if they weren’t so ridiculously biased.

Games are for fun, in my mind, challenging, entertaining, deep but fun. This game is designed to ridicule anyone from the UK and goes out of it’s way to make us look small minded and foolish while simultaneously glorifying everything that is not British. Essentially it attempts to show the EU as the land beneath the rainbow while mocking the UK.

Now, it does not matter if you are pro EU or anti EU, the game assumes you are a fool either way. Messages from the EU traffic like “We offer you freedom of movement” or “Unity” or “We never liked you anyway” are all thrown out. As are “We will allow you to be the financial hub” and “We will help you with cancer research”. Meanwhile the British bus throws out backward slogans like “Bloody Foreigners” or “Where is my tea” as well as “Let’s make diesel dirty again” and “We didn’t actually mean to leave”.

So you get a couple funny ones and a fair few insulting ones. That is nothing compared to the statements added when you crash. The results screen. Now when you crash, you get a nice little pile up which is fun to watch once or twice. You also get a total distance travelled result in kilometers.

The statements on this screen assume future disaster for the UK and splendid happiness for the EU. They sarcastically point out that, as we crashed, we cannot leave and have therefore “been flooded with good food” or “that out country is no longer collapsing”. They state that “oh no, you crashed so still have to have free trade” or “no parts of our country want to secede anymore”.

This is where the problem lies – too much focus on anti UK politics and not enough on solid gameplay. I assume this game was made in lunch breaks at the EU headquarters in Brussels so, while it may sound good in principle, it looks pretty enough and sounds fine. It is just dull, repetitive and entirely superficial.

It is free so maybe worth a quick download for 10 or 15 minutes gameplay but I would imagine you will be deleting it very quickly after that.

Brexit! is available on the Apple app store and on Android devices now.