Game Review – General Election (Mobile – Free to Play)

Look everybody – a bandwagon. Let’s jump on it. Another political event brings forth another drab and dreary game attempting to piggy back on top of a hot topic to generate revenue. This time it is General Election. Almost as certain as a real election being full of lies, fake smiles and boring slogans is the arrival of an accompanying mobile game that appears rushed so it can be released while relevant.

General Election is brought to us by Red Two Apps.

In General Election we get to choose a political party. Half the screen is blue, emblazoned with the face of Theresa May representing the Conservative party. The other half is red with Jeremy Corbyn’s face on it representing Labour. We are invited to tap one of their faces and select a party. That is pretty much the whole of the game.

Select a party and you enter game mode which is you continuously tapping the face of the party you have selected from the home screen. The difficulty comes in that while boringly tapping away at the face of your chosen party, occasionally the opposition’s face will appear.

Tap the correct face, you get a point. Tap the wrong face, you lose 5 points. The game doesn’t have a story, or funny slogans or anything else. Try and set a high score by tapping the right face, That is it.

Occasionally either the face of Nigel Farage or Tim Farron will appear too. Accidentally tapping them will either give you plus or minus 20 points. It is random but with so many ways of losing points, the best thing to do is avoid tapping them. In fact, the easiest way to set a high score is to just tap a few times in the beginning to build up a little core and then leave it to play out avoiding all the minus points available.

So, a game designed around tapping which is best played by not tapping. Awesome. Still we all like setting high scores right? Well, even that is nonsense here as your score doesn’t matter. There are no leaderboards and as soon as you close the app, your scores are wiped. On top of that, you are given huge boosts to your high score in return for sharing the game on social media.

General Election is free and doesn’t have any in app purchases. Instead it is littered with ads. Absolutely littered with them. They pop up after every single turn. This is made worse as each turn is timed and lasts for 30 seconds. An ad every 30 seconds is bad. On top of that, every click brings forth another ad. Click the “information” button – you get an ad. The game is littered with them.

The music is an annoying little jingle that plays in repeat that is unrelated to the game. Thankfully it can be muted quickly.

In short, this game has nothing going for it. The first 30 seconds of this game show you everything it has to offer. I imagine anyone who has downloaded it will be quickly deleting it straight afterwards.

Red Two Apps can be proud of one thing alone. They have made a game about elections that perfectly recreates the monotony and irritation of real ones.

Feel free to try it for yourself be hitting the link below.