Monday, October 29, 2012

Mini Review: Organ Trail


Today I figured that I would take a look at a mobile game (since I seem to be spending more and more time interacting with mobile media.) So today I'm going to briefly go over the game Organ Trail (not to be confused with Oregon trail). The game is a riff off of the super popular original Oregon trail and presents a very well polished  and clean take on the classic.

Much like in the original Oregon trail you make a few decisions about how you will start out your game choosing what and how much of each kind of supplies that you'll take in your beaten up station wagon in an attempt to survive the journey from one end of the country to the other.

As in the original incarnation, the journey across the United States will not be an easy one. Your station wagon will break down, your friends will be bitten by zombies (and you may have to pull the trigger to end their suffering) , and you wont have enough bullets to take out all the baddies in your way. The same harsh choices that made the original game a classic present themselves in different ways in this new take.


The game, written by a small indie development team called The Men Who Wear Many Hats, comes across as incredibly polished and well done. It's retro graphics look like they came straight off of an old apple and the sound and music design follow suite.

The only complaint that I might possibly be able to formulate about the game play is that, at least on phones, the aiming mechanism for some of the action portions of the game (usually shooting at zombies) is a little harder to pull off than it might need to be. This isn't quite as much of a problem of my tablet since the screen is larger and lets me be a little more precise. On my phone, however, aiming can be quite tricky. Between tapping to move your character and clicking and dragging to aim and release shots sometimes you will find your character moving when you intend to shoot or shooting at nothing instead of moving. On smaller screened devices this can make aiming a bit of a bother.

Aiming trouble aside I feel its a pretty solid game for scratching a retro itch on the go.

Check out their website here

(played on Motorola Razr and Asus Transformer)

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