The journey continues on my 3 month plan to try every single PS Plus Extra game in a 3 month time period. It would be impossible for me to try all of them to completion in this amount of time even if I was gaming for 15 hours a day. The lack of time and because of the fact that I am not really that good of a gamer would hold me back as well. Therefore I am devoting a minimum of 1 hour to every single game in the library that I found myself in possession of after drunkenly signing up for it a few weeks ago.
I am deliberately ignoring most games made by AAA studios because those have been covered enough and of course, most of them have at least some redeeming qualities. I wasn't expecting the PS Plus games to be very good, but I am looking for hidden gems, not big-budget productions. For the most part I have found that there is a reason why these games are free and that is because they are either terrible, or don't stand much chance of selling anymore because they are older.
Moving Out is an anomaly though because while it is good, it isn't something that is going to hold the interest of most gamers for very long.
The idea behind this game is that you work for a moving company and you have to get all the selected stuff inside of a house into a moving truck in as fast a time as possible. There is no time-limit that I became aware of in the hour that I played this game, so there isn't really any way to lose. The motivation to go quickly is tied to your account and whether or not any of your online friends also have the game. It will compare your times to theirs and for some people, I guess that is fun.
The graphics are reminiscent of The Sims games of yesteryear but instead of building something you are simply moving it out to a truck. In a very humorous way, it isn't an objective to not break anything. In fact, you are encouraged to throw items and even jump through windows, breaking them.
The tutorial is intuitive and very funny as they create an entire "company culture" of intentionally breaking stuff in order to get it out of the way. After 10 minutes of "training" which is the tutorial, you are hired and sent off to your new career in furniture.
There really isn't much to this game because the levels just become larger houses with more stuff in them and therefore you have to be increasingly careful about how you place them in the truck. I only play as a 1-player game so it was sometime a bit too difficult to move larger things like sofas and beds which would have been a lot easier I presume if I was playing with a friend.
I can appreciate the small studio's efforts in making this game and they won a bunch of awards for it, which they deserve considering the size of the company. However, this doesn't mean this is a great game because it isn't. After 1 hour of playing it I was actually quite excited about getting to switch it off because well, there is only so much variety that can be introduced into moving furniture. I made it through 3.5 levels in an hour and when I was posed with completing the 4th, which I could have done, I just felt that I would rather not be playing it than continue. This isn't the fault of the devs because I think they did a fantastic job of introducing gameplay and keeping it humorous enough that you want to see what they are going to say next. The problem is that this is going to get old pretty fast and I don't really know what they could have possibly done to prevent that.
I think that if you can get this game for free that it is worth an hour or two but that is about it. It could probably be fun to play with a friend or younger people because that would eliminate a lot of the frustration that exists with moving large items on your own... you know... just like in real life.
