It’s The End Of The World And This Game Is Unprepared

Posted 5 months ago By - Michael Dulson

Some of the human race get very creative when thinking how the world will end. Zombies, a Mayan prediction, nuclear destruction, the list goes on and on. Doomsday Preppers is a new documentary show on National Geographic with each episode featuring different people and families, how they believe the end will happen, and how they prepare for it. Now the App Store has a free game based on the show. Movie to video game adaptions (and vice versa) don’t usually get the love they deserve, a lot of times resulting in some utterly horrid experiences. Does Doomsday Preppers make a good transition from television series to video game?

After watching a few episodes of the show that the game is based on, I watched people train themselves with firearms or a physical workout, so I thought that the game would have at least SOME of the same variety. Sadly, it does not. The game is a building management sim. Yes, you read that right. After seeing one screenshot, you’ll see that the game shares the same stylings as other building management games like Tiny Tower or Mega Mall Story. The music isn’t anything special as it sounds like something you would hear waiting in the elevator on your way up to a stuffy lawyers office. The graphics aren’t much either, as it looks far too much like a facebook game.

Doomsday Preppers starts you out with choosing a character and a background. The gameplay has you - instead of building upwards like in Tiny Tower - building your apocalypse bunker downwards. Each floor level can be a different area based on a need of survival. You can choose from a greenhouse, recreation floor, first aid, and many more. There is a tunnel floor which lets you go to other players or friends bunkers to grab supplies from them. To build a level, you need gold, and you get gold when food or supplies are prepared or by paying for it via in-app purchases. The random characters that appear throughout your bunker have specialities, and each will need to be placed when you open a floor that takes advantage of their respective speciality, e.x. a person that is good at cleaning is best placed in the cleaning floor. The biggest problem I had with Doomsday Preppers is that overall it’s very boring because there is no real ‘spice’ to the gameplay. All the time spent in the game preparing the bunker for the end is for nothing. I would have loved to see the actual in-game apocalyptic disasters to mix up the gameplay, like maybe have an earthquake take out half of the bunker or a flash flood take away the bottom floor or something. Have something interesting!

Final Focus

There’s not a lot to like about Doomsday Preppers since it is just a basic, and incredibly dull, building management sim. Preparing a bunker for hours on end with no final apex makes for a lackluster and unmotivating experience. The developers really should’ve thrown in some in-game doomsday events to add some objective to this empty apocalyptic title because without it, this game saw its end much sooner.

If you really insist on subjugating yourself to this mess (it is free after all), you can grab it off the App Store right now...