Brooktown High is a simulation of high school dating … well, a simulation of
high school clichés at least. You play the new kid at school and need to work
your way up from an unknown nobody to one of the popular kids in the in
crowd. You begin the game by answering a set of questions that are used
to determine your personality scores. It’s not too hard to see where the game
is going with its questions while you’re taking the test as the game divides
the student body into four cliques: jocks, nerds, preps, and rockers. It
doesn’t really matter all that much where you are placed after you take the
test – your personality can be easily modified in the game simply by taking
certain classes at school or signing up for an extracurricular activity.
The game revolves around a week of school and each week pretty much plays out in
the same way. You wake up in your room on Monday morning and from there you can
pick out your outfit for the week or use your computer to shop online for new
clothes or gifts to woo the ladies (or guys). There’s not really much else you
can do from your room, so on most weeks you’ll just click on the bedroom door
and head to school. Once at school you’ll have a half hour until classes begin
during which you can meet and socialize with the other students. That’s a half
hour of game time, so in reality you barely have time to talk to one student,
two if you’re lucky. Since the students randomly mill about in front of the
school and in its halls, there’s not really any way for you to find a
particular student that you’re interested in speaking with. You’ll just have to
run up to the first one you can find and then try to quickly start another
conversation before the bell goes off. Once the bell does go off it’s a mad
scramble to get to a classroom and pick your class for the week. Yes, at
Brooktown High you take the same class for five days straight. As it just so
happens, there are four classes available at Brooktown and each one corresponds
to one of the school’s four cliques. For example, you’ll want to take gym to
fit in with the jocks or physics to score points with the nerds. You don’t do
anything for the classes – you just pick one and the next thing you know it’s
Saturday and you’re a week closer to graduation.
The conversations that you have with your classmates are multiple choice
sequences in which you choose your response to each statement made by your
classmate. It’s not hard to determine the best answer to give in each case;
it’s simply a matter of telling the other person what they want to hear. In a
way this is a sim of the way some people swim their way through the dating
pool, but between this and the game’s clichéd personalities the game offers a
subtlely jaded look at the high school dating scene.
Tell a schoolmate what she wants to hear enough times and you’ll be able to ask
her out on a date. A date is essentially an extended version of the preschool
conversations where the choices are again pretty straightforward to make.
Dating a prep? Take her to the mall and go shopping for clothes. Not a tough
choice to make, right? You'll be kissing your way to the top of the
social heap in no time.
And so it goes for the rest of the school year. Talk to as many students as
possible, try to get dates with them, and keep repeating the process. There’s
no interaction in your classes or extracurrilar activities, so you basically
move from one multiple choice conversation to the next. Once you reach the end
of the school year you’re performance is evaluated and you’re told where you
end up in lifie. Thank goodness that only in a game does your senior year in
high school determine the course of the rest of your life. I'd be in a
lot of trouble right now otherwise...
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 55%.
There’s not enough gameplay and too much repetition in this high school game …
perhaps in that way it’s too much like the real thing.
