GAMES REVIEW: Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow

You’ve been waiting for this new Futurama game and now the game will make you wait for more.

Futurama was a huge deal in the animation scene. With an award-winning run over 14 years, this show had captured countless fans with its funny well-timed comedy and heart string pulling tender moments. But all that ended on September 4, 2013 with the series finale of the show, closing off the series with an open-ended loop ending for the story within the show to continue as long as fans kept it in mind. Now we got this mobile game, with a story written by the team behind Futurama. Initially, I was very skeptical of the game’s capabilities to be able to get across Futurama’s trademark comedy writing as a lot of what drew people into the comedy of the original series was the performances of the wonderful cast of the characters. Even in the later seasons when the show’s writing in my opinion plateaued in a sense making it very meh, the characters still brought a lot of personality to the dialogue even if it was stale.

The game by contrast has the animated intro, sound bites of the characters’ voices and that’s it. Other than that, we get the comedy through text bubbles and the question really becomes, can this game really live up to the standard that Futurama set for it. The contextual story of the game is the planet express crew is out on another delivery, bringing hypno toads together, when by their combined hypno powers cause a spread of hypnowaves across the universe engulfing everything until Fry is left alone. So now fry must gather 7 ancient artifacts by video game logic to save the universe and his friends from the hypno waves.

From here you enter in on the Sim City portion of the game, where you have the characters of Futurama; Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Bender, Amy and more walking about the streets of New New York while you buy buildings to place within the limits of the space you start off in. Now in this portion of the game players build these buildings to amass more nixonbucks to pay for bigger and better show referencing buildings as each building pays out rent on a set time scale. For example, if you buy a suicide booth, every 3 hours you will be paid out 50 nixonbucks and 35 experience points. But you can also earn nixonbucks by having the cast perform various actions like Fry sleeping in a closet, the professor delivering good news and Amy falling down. This also has a set time limit for each action with varying rewards of nixonbucks and experience depending on how long.

But this game isn’t just earning nixonbucks by making the cast acting crazy, because if you focused on that you would soon notice that you aren’t able to clear space in New New York as these actions do not earn you hypnotons, which is the 2nd currency used to purchase more building space. To earn more hypnotons, players enter the 2nd half of the game, the space exploration RPG. Here you select a crew to go with you on a mission that is offered, and you travel along a set path completing dialogue trees and getting into 8-bit combat. The fighting system works on a timing based strategy system, where a circle around your enemy will fill up, tap your enemy at the right time and they will land a critical hit. By contrast when your enemy attacks if you tap at the right time you block, only getting partial damage.

Strategy opens up when you discover the various classes that the game offers as you recruit new crew members who are assigned a skill class which gives them a separate normal and super attack. Like scientist class have a critical hit effect that hits all enemies on screen, influencers have a special move that heals the whole party, and robots have defense boosting special moves to name the few you get during the first few days of playing. Now I’ve played games like the 1st half of Worlds of Tomorrow, a clear inspiration I can think of is the Simpsons game Tapped Out where you are tasked with building and populating Springfield with all your favorite characters and places from the show. Both games give you a sort of ant farm sort of enjoyment, watching the little characters move around and enjoying the aesthetic of each show’s world. In contrast the 2nd half of this game comes across as a mixture of old choose your own adventure games and a rhythm based Paper Mario attack system (albeit with far less customization in how you can attack your foes).

I just keep going over how these two halves of the game fit and after a while I had to admit to myself they don’t at all. Unfortunately, the two halves of the game mechanics have counter imposing goals to them which hinders the game greatly. Game 1 is the sims where you are amassing funds to build more buildings and get new people to populate and design your New New York however you want. It’s a slow boil mechanic system where the enjoyment comes from setting your own goal and seeing it come to fruition after time and dedication. Game 2 is a quicker paced adventure system where players want to blaze through battles to complete all the branches in the levels you can travel in so they can advance through the game’s story. That sounds great to have in this game if it were structured to work alongside with the Sims gameplay to invigorate engagement, but the game designers wrecked it by making the upgrade system dictated by how much nixonbucks you can spend on your characters. Because you don’t get experience but career chips in the space RPG gameplay but they aren’t immediately added on top of the characters you used. You know, like any other normal RPG? You have to go through the second step of paying nixonbucks to install the career chips into the characters.

So, to boil the system down, if you want to continue growing your party members levels up you HAVE TO do the Sims Game and wait for literal days’ worth of time and dedication to boost them. Creating a complete halt gameplay to just wait around in hopes to upgrade your characters ASAP to advance the plot in the RPG missions. But behind this roadblock is another roadblock in the RPG section where missions aren’t loaded until you complete missions set in the Sims gameplay. At first glance that doesn’t seem so bad, until you realize some missions practically lock you out of future Space RPG missions until you complete them which involves waiting hours either building a building or having a character do a stupid action. Its gameplay centered around waiting for the gameplay to start and I have to be really blunt here to make this as clear as possible. As soon as playing a game feels like busywork it falls to the enjoyment level of doing taxes or sending out job applications. It’s the dullest routine but with no confirmable benefit because unlike in other mobile games like PewDiePie: Tuber Simulator or Kingdom Hearts X where their grindy nature is set to one constant time with a very clear means of how long it’ll take to complete a task, you don’t get that clarity here. To complete one mission in the game you can literally be sitting waiting for over 24 hours’ worth of time for one mission to complete as also added into the mission mechanics, an element of random chance.

The game becomes stuck between its stale comedy presentation, its game play mechanics and the micro transactions, which I barely touched on here as the main reason I want to show why this game feels like it is a mess is because of how the game mechanics clash creating a waiting game too dull to invest in. Although I can really boil down my thoughts on it by making the observation the game leaves its player in the position of either spending a disturbingly large amount of time to get anywhere by taking the free route or being punctured in their wallet if they happen to be impatient and purchasing the game’s short cut currency, pizza. I get the inclusion of it, micro transactions are a necessary evil if we want these interesting free games to play. However, if you have a literal mission in the game where you have to purchase said micro transactions to complete it, that shows the game’s more soulless money grubbing nature in full force and it makes the rest of the waiting mechanics come off as an exploit towards very impatient fans. Futurama Sim City edition and Futurama space RPG are both interesting concepts for games and I think separately they can be widely enjoyed but as the game currently is structured it’s a dull boring wait of a game and not even pizza can sell me on spending a dime on it.

SCORE
4/10