The Cream of the Crap – Need For Drink
Searching the bowels of the new release page on Steam can every now and then pay off with a small unique indie or just a silly time killer. While searching you find a title that other players have rated decently and the trailer looks funny and weird so you take that massive commitment of dropping that $1.99 on something that will hopefully give you a few chuckles. I was hoping Need for Drink was going to be another one of those, plus it met the above listed criteria, so I gave it a go. Well I was wrong, really wrong and I blame myself, but more so the people who actually gave it a thumbs up on Steam.
Need for Drink is a bad relationship/drinking simulator. It begins with a dating site meet-up, you get married, and then 5 years later you’re drinking like a fish and want a divorce. Ahhh marriage. Need For Drink is a casual multiplayer game about competition between the spouses: a drunkard husband and his brawler wife.
Basically, one player is the wife and the other is the husband. The goal of the husband is to run around the house drinking all the booze as the wife tries to destroy the booze before the husband can get to it. That’s about it. There are a couple of other modes, but essentially the goal is the same. For example, the “divorce” mode, the two love birds try to run around the house packing up their things before the other does. Yes, the gameplay has that much depth. There is a single player mode, but this is even more shallow than the multiplayer because there is no second player. You’re just put on a timer to drink the booze before the wife comes home or destroy the booze before the hubby wakes up.
Now before I say this next part, I just want to express that I don’t condone spousal abuse at all. That being said, I feel like if there was some sort of interaction between these two miserable people, whether it’s pushing and shoving or somehow creating barriers or traps for each other to keep them from getting to the booze, that would at least make the gameplay more interesting.
The environmental graphics are actually pretty good though nothing really impressive. There are only two locations to play, which obviously makes no difference since you won’t be playing this game often anyway. While the environments are at least serviceable, the character models aren’t. They’re low-res and look like a terrible eyesore within the better rendered environments. The sound design is also poor and while there was a good opportunity for some pretty funny banter between the two love birds, none of it stood out or was very humorous.
Need for Drink is a boring, shallow game that tries to have a funny theme that maybe a couple of friends could have fun with, but really fails by not offering anything special or different. The only thing this game did successfully was make me seriously question how it has 531 positive reviews on Steam. Those people must be more inebriated than the husband in the game.
Need for Drink is available now on Steam.