Another music-based social game has come to Facebook. Home Fest — the first game from Argentina-based developer Atommica, created in association with Bueeno and Sony Music Latin America — lets you throw a house party with bumping beats. As you might expect, the concept borrows heavily from Booyah’s popular title, Nightclub City. But the game feels a bit sparse, as many features haven’t been released yet.
In Home Fest, you own a house and set out to throw a great party. To do so, you must decorate the space to be appealing and purchase various forms of entertainment to keep your guests happy while they dance to snippets of popular music.
Music is a core aspect, and Atommica delivers great tunes. You start a party for a set period of time (longer parties cost more) and choose music to play. You don’t get the ability to pick specific songs, but unlike Nightclub City, you are able to choose the mix of genres to play: Pop, R&B, Rock, Reggaeton, and Dance.
Most songs are from top, popular artists like Justin Timberlake and Kelly Clarkson. There are also some cover songs from Glee and a number of Spanish titles. You can purchase songs you like through Amazon.com, which is linked directly through the game. The music all sounds fantastic and you could easily just leave the game running in the background for that alone.
Of course, you need more than music to make a party. As guests begin filing in, you need to provide entertainment. To keep guests happy, you must purchase different entertainment fixtures such as DJ booths, bars, hot tubs, and so on. The more entertainment you have, the more guests arrive and the more cover charges you collect. Different entertainment items also earn extra income over periods of time.
Decor items that don’t provide entertainment, also do not seem to affect guest happiness. The variety is also fairly standard: chairs, tables, and so forth. Thus far, wallpapers are unavailable, and the volume of decor items feels pretty low. Home Fest is still a new game, however, so this will certainly change over time.
The Social Features of Home Fest also seem incomplete. Right now, friends can visit one another’s homes, but there isn’t anything to do there. Gifting isn’t ready, but it is coming. The only other apparent social mechanic is that party guests are usually random Facebook friends.
The only real issue with House Fest is that it needs to mature. It simply lacks the polish that Nightclub City had at its release. As an example, guests come in and dance the same moves during the whole party, only occasionally walking around. In Nightclub City, they dance, talk, visit the bar, get angry, and generally, just interact with each other more, making the game gratifying to watch.
In the end, Home Fest has some great music, but still comes off as a lesser version of Nightclub City. Home Fest’s entertainment décor mechanic is a nice, differentiating factor, we just need more items to decorate with. We will be watching with interest to see how this game develops. So far, it has grown to over 19,000 monthly active users.
Source: Inside Social Games
Wednesday, September 29, 2010