Party in My Dorm is a free social RPG for the iPhone. An RPG that takes place in a college dorm? Let’s check it out.
The game starts off with you picking a character for your party. You’ve got a couple of classes to choose from, such as jock, cheerleader, party guy, goth girl and geek. The class you choose doesn’t affect the game’s storyline because, well, there is no storyline.
It’s sort of like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. That game didn’t have a storyline either. Um, I mean, that game has a heavy focus on building a good party, by picking a variety of different types of characters.
Your party members all live in the same dorm, so in order to get more party members, you need to build more dorm rooms. If you’ve got an empty dorm room, you can pay someone to move in. Yes, that’s right. You have to pay tenants to move into your dorm. Usually, it’s the other way around. I guess that means my dorm is a really bad place to live.
OK, so you’ve got a good party. What now? There are three things your party can do: jobs, battle and club.
Completing jobs is simple. Press the “go” button to accept a job. Depending on your stats and the difficulty of the job, you will either succeed or fail. If you succeed, you get money. If you fail, you don’t.
Battle lets you fight against one of the other people playing the game at the moment, in an attempt to take their money. There is no battle screen or anything like that; you just get told whether or not you won the battle. Battle mode is probably more fun if you’re playing the game with friends, because you know who you’re fighting against. In my experience, it was just a less successful way to get money.
Club is another social activity. You and your friends can join a club together, and you can wage war with other clubs. I didn’t try this feature.
Every time you attempt a job or battle, you lose some HP and MP. The HP and MP meters automatically refill at the slow rate of 9%, once every 5 minutes. Fortunately, the automatic refill happens, even if your iOS device is turned off. So if you’re low on strength and intelligence, do something else for an hour, then return to the game to find yourself back at 100%. Alternately, you can pay real money for an item which heals you back to the maximum.
The chat room at the bottom of the screen is filled with typical chat room nonsense. I ignored it. I guess I kind of ignored all the social aspects of this game. I must not be very good at playing social RPGs.
The artwork is spot-on, and the writing is appropriately humorous. I especially like the fact that you can upgrade characters to Sophomore, Junior and Senior levels. The music is…non-existent. Really? Is it that hard to find background music? Just go to Internet Archive and get some free, non-copyrighted instrumental music. It might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s better than nothing.
All in all, Party in My Dorm is a decent enough social RPG, and I could see myself playing it every now and then when I’m bored. I prefer RPGs to social games, so I would have liked seeing a story mode or something similar, but that’s obviously not what they were aiming for. I also think they weren’t aiming for the “must be 17+ to play this game” rating that they got slapped with, but hey, that’s life. In any case, the game is free, and it’s only 7.3 MB, so you might as well check it out if you think it sounds good.
I’m sure I’ve played another RPG set in a dorm, though it seemed to be much better than this one.
If only someone would make an adventure game set in a dorm! That would surely be a day-one purchase.
You know, that’s not a half-bad idea…
This sounds like a game on facebook I used to play…. ‘Sorority Life’ I think.
this game is super fun though 🙂
This game is a sex game. People you don’t know will ALWAYS message you asking for a kik account or Skype so you can send nudes to each other. That’s why it is 17+. No one actually plays the game. There are creepy stalkers and bored horny teenagers.