Bakushow Review

A game where you make all the content? I bet you've sat there thumbing your controller on a quiet Friday night and thought "Oh if I made this game it'd have...." Well now Rising Star Games brings us this little bargain friendly party game where you do just that, you and up to 4 friends create all the content in a pseudo Quiz show with yourself as the host.

Firstly I'd like to point out here and now that this game is multiplayer only, I know the RRP alone makes the game rather desirable but be aware that if you want to buy it then make sure all your friends have DS's too otherwise you'll be stuck on the "Waiting for players to join" screen forever. The game uses download play to send the game to your friends DS's so all 4 players can play with 1 game cart.

Ok you've found 3 other people with DS's and you're ready to play. As the owner of the game cart you are the host and thus are presented with a blank canvas onto which you set a challenge. The game works on the principle that you think of a question or draw an incomplete picture and your friends have to answer the question or complete the image, and this is where the main gameplay problem lies. As with Picochat it is extremely difficult to write any more than a few words resulting in you actually telling your friends what the challenge is which kind of makes the idea of writing a question seem a little pointless but I digress.

While you are masterfully crafting your conundrum your friends have a minigame to pass their time, well I use the term minigame in its loosest definition, the minigame involves you tapping little scurrying creatures to rack up a score, what that score means to any aspect of the game I don't know but it seems to keep the others occupied while I rattled the dusty recesses of my mind for the next challenge.

Right, you've set your challenge now it's time to send it. You can choose how long your friends have to work on the challenge that can on occasion frustrate if you want to start over and you only have 30 seconds left. Once everyone is done the host can present everyone's answer to the other members playing, at this point your supposed to begin deciding which answer is the funniest then once all are presented you can vote as to which is the best. Everyone has three stars which you can give to any of the other players (you can give yourself a maximum of 1 too) then the results are revealed and someone wins.

Now go back up this page three paragraphs and read them again as this is pretty it, after a few goes as host the game moves the host duty to one of your friends which is the only saving grace as player 1 is not stuck as host trying to come up with challenges all the time. Saying that though the only way to get new content for the game is to get new friends, as you and your friends make all the content once you've dried them up of driven them away with the over repetitiveness you'll have no choice but to either trade in or find new people to play with.

Replay value? The game has only 1 (not including the credits) mode and after a short while with no real progression I found my friends interest as well as my own waning, I understand this generation has seen the rise of more casual games for people who don't play games too often but in my view a game without any kind of progression looses any form of drive to play it. If it's not broken don't try to fix it the expression goes and it certainly rings true for this game, if you want to play charades the go and play charades, it's a fun game with an extremely similar likeness to Bakushow and it costs nothing to play.

The lack of other options such as minigames or different modes means you'll be reaching for the off button after only an hour or so of play, the game seems to be unfinished and I cannot recommend a purchase unless you are a hard-core pictionary/charades fan.