Miss Drama Queen Review

If you've played any before, you might be starting to recognise a style to AMA titles. More applications than games, most share a clean, clinical look with realistic looking people who move with the rigidity of shop mannequins.

Which is acceptable when you're playing a game about horoscopes or reducing stress, but not so acceptable for something like Miss Drama Queen, which is trying very hard to be a game.

It's not just that Miss Drama Queen has all the visual warmth of Asda's frozen meat section. The whole premise is all a bit strange.

Your character, who looks like she's just walked off the set of 90210, has entered a magazine beauty contest to be crowned the ultimate drama queen. This contest involves getting through nine different rounds without losing all three of your lives. Lose them all and you have to start again.

While you might be thinking that doesn't sound particularly strange, picture this - one of the rounds involves juggling while balanced on a board atop a big beach ball and catching clown heads falling all around you.

How many beauty contests have you ever seen where the contestants do that?

The rest of the games are at least tied in to a beauty contest, in that they tick off lots of stereotypical girl activities, such as cooking, shopping, cheerleading and dressing up. Oh, and identifying famous buildings and landmarks from around the world.

Most are still ill-conceived in their execution, however, if not in their subject matter. For instance, the cheerleading game is completely nonsensical. You're meant to create a shape using various different poses but it's very difficult to grasp what order the game wants you to stack them up in.

There's also a terrible game called Stay Cool which takes place on a beach. Its end goal is simply to survive for two minutes on the beach without getting burnt. Stay under an umbrella or sheltered by a tree and you don't get burnt. Err.

There's a water meter which you have to make sure doesn't run empty, but a few quick dashes out from your shade to grab a bottle is all it takes to get through this obscenely boring game.

In Embarrassing Situations you blindly negotiate a series of multiple choice questions to which the answers are completely unclear. Not that it matters, because the answers aren't broken down for you anyway - you just get an overall score.

There is at least some competitive element to Miss Drama Queen. You're given a target score to attain to get through each round and you're also up against other competitors and their scores.

However, the game's scoring system isn't very clear during a game so you can only really muddle through as best you can and hope for a good result at the end.

Once you've completed a game in the main mode, you unlock it to play individually in one of three difficulty levels. To be honest, though, they hold even more limited appeal without the overriding goal of actually scoring enough points to move onto the next round.

Even the more playable games - like one that has you shopping for clothes against a time limit and trying to enter shops when they have the biggest sales on - are only really good for two or three goes.

AMA has done some decent phone applications and most have contained mini-games of varying quality. However, making a good 'proper' game which relies entirely on these mini-games has eluded AMA this time around. Miss Drama Queen just doesn't put on a decent enough performance.