Mobile Gaming Month: Dumb Ways To Die

Game: Dumb Ways To Die
Platform: Android
Developer: Metro Trains
Release Date: 17th September 2013

Originally a train safety video, Dumb Ways to Die implied that while rewiring your own house, poking a bear and eating super glue are dumb ways to die, being impatient at level crossings, walking across train tracks and standing beyond the yellow line on a train platform are in fact the dumbest ways to die. It's not often that a game, let alone a good game comes from an advertising campaign, but just under a year after the original video, Dumb Ways to Die was released as a minigame collection style game.

With a choice of 13 games in total, the game isn't as expansive as other minigame collections, but there's a good amount of variety nonetheless. The activities featured in the minigames include many of the "ways to die" from the video campaign, and the object of each is to prevent the character(s) from dying by tapping, tilting, drawing on the screen and blowing into the phone's microphone (though this minigame can be disabled in the options thankfully).

The minigames themselves are fairly fun and responsive; the only one I had a real issue with was the one which requires players to blow on their phone's microphone, as it didn't seem to detect any sound. At times the difficulty of some games seems far higher than others, but this is a pretty constant feature of minigame collections and may be percieved differently from person to person.

Gameplay continues with increasing speed and difficulty until players have failed 3 minigames in total, leading to the game over screen. 100 points are awarded for each game successfully completed, as well as a random bonus which can be good or bad, but is usually given a humourous title. As players pass certain amounts of points in each turn, they unlock characters on the game's starting screen, though this has no effect on the gameplay as a whole. This is perhaps the weakest part of the game as whole; there's very little replay value once players feel as if they're competent at all of the games. Luckily there's a sequel which I plan to check out at some point soon.

Graphically the game is more stylistically impressive than technically impressive, but this is usually the case with mobile gaming. The simple characters and cutesy representations of some pretty gruesome deaths are one of the reasons that the video and campaign as a whole became so popular. There's a musical theme based on the song from the ad campaign behind gameplay, and the package as a whole is well polished and fun to interact with.

Overall Dumb Ways to Die was an excellent informational campaign which spawned a fun mobile game, which while limited in its replayability and number of minigames offered players an extension of the original video and a fairly original gameplay experience (which is more than can be said for many mobile titles).

Rating: 75/100
Grade: B