My Moviestar: Dream High iPhone Game Review
Price: Free Score: 8/10 Category: Games
Offering up a free app or game is tough. On the one hand, if you offer up a stellar product that’s free, people tend to be more impressed by it. On the other hand, a free app that’s riddled with typos or bad graphics just comes off as cheap and amateur.
My Moviestar: Dream High, developed by Pictosoft, has some high points, but is often held back by poor translation that garbles the dialogue. Exacerbating the game’s problems was the tendency for the app to crash. I’ve played buggier games, but the frequent crashes were annoying.
On top of that, given that the target audience is probably young girls, some of the story elements seem a bit body-negative. Mothers of pre-teen girls might want to beware of letting girls play My Moviestar: Dream High without having a talk about body image first, as you need to make frequent visits to the beauty parlor to get ahead in the game (and some of the dialogue is pretty cutting.)
All that being said, I really did find myself getting sucked into this young girl’s quest to become a famous actress in My Moviestar: Dream High. Going on auditions, shopping for new clothes, eating in restaurants…it’s like a very niche version of The Sims.
The tutorial is very thorough, but it’s pretty obnoxious that when you do things out of order (like get your first film role before you go on your first shopping trip), the game doesn’t pick up on it.
Pictosoft has a pretty decent selection of titles, and to be honest My Moviestar isn’t my favorite (that honor goes to Medal of Gunner), but it just might be your cup of tea, despite the dialogue issues and the frequent crashing. It’s a fun iPhone game that unfortunately gets marred by some of its technical issues.
My Moviestar: Dream High is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.1 or later.