JoJo’s Fashion Show: World Tour
iWin Games
8/10
I’m not going to apologize for reviewing a children’s dress up game- deal with it. Jojo’s is my guilty pleasure. Where other fashion games are mostly empty fantasies in taffeta and bubblegum pink, Jojo’s steps it up with style boot camp that pulls looks right off the hottest current day runways to make addicts out of even the toughest fashionistas. I’ve whiled away countless hours on the other two incarnations, sucking in friends along with me. Jojo’s is more than a dress-up game, it is like Rosetta Stone for fashion. It teaches you to look, lust, and learn. By the end of it, you’ll find yourself obsessively style scoring strangers in front of you in line at the movies and waking in a cold sweat from nightmares about going out in public without your shoes.
World Tour features realistic styles and current looks that feel more wearable than ever before. Pieces inspired by the street style from Amsterdam, Tokyo, and London will make you wish they had a “Buy Now” button built into the game. It was a thrill to get to work with clothing I would personally see myself and my friends wearing in real life. Even the models and graphics were wonderfully detailed and realistic and had a more mature look.
Not all the fashions hit the mark though, like kimono and bridal inspired designs, and it often felt like there was too little overlap between different styles to provide challenge. Where the previous games forced you to budget your items and think about your strategy to maximize their potential putting together outfits this time around just feels like a mindless matching game. Points were given out like candy, making it more of a challenge to fail a stage than to beat it. The scoring system seemed almost arbitrary, and the overly difficult to obtain and distinguish signature outfits served no real purpose at all. Many images were too small to pick out some of the finer details and the controls seemed awkward, which when working against the clock can be needlessly frustrating.
The game boasts that you can see how well your custom designs potentially would score on the runway but not all the elements that you get scored on get represented or even appear as options. Rather than a numerical gauge to let you know how well you are doing there’s just a rudimentary and woefully incomplete word bank at the top of the screen.
It felt like there should have been more diverse challenges to harness the potential of the game. The game does away with all but their signature stages and leaves a void as nothing is added to replace them. Straight forward runway stages quickly become repetitive as the same outfits crop up again and again.
This game could have been so much more but it makes a lot of poor choices and clumsy mistakes that do a disservice to the reputation it garnered with previous games. World Tour tantalizes you with its most inspiring fashions yet while only giving you agonizingly limited ways to use them. Jojo’s World Tour proves to be the classic tease in an unfortunate case of “Look but Don’t Touch.”
— Laura Gaddy