Soda Drinker Pro Review
Games are part of the fabric of our social consciousness. Games have power. Play is such a fundamental part of our makeup that games can change who we are, how we perceive the world around us, and how we interact with each other. The science behind games can help us increase understanding of ourselves and those around us, or help us celebrate joy or understand tragedy.
“A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.”
~ Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken.
Soda Drinker Pro takes those high ideals, takes decades of gaming history and invention, and does absolutely nothing with them. Nothing at all.
At first we struggled to understand Soda Drinker Pro. Not because it’s complex or intricate, or because its ambition exceeds its reach. We struggled to understand why it exists at all. Our considered take is that developer Snowrunner Productions is shooting for high satire; their aim to reflect back on the industry its current obsession with churlish simulator games. Goat Simulator. Train Simulator. Euro Truck Simulator. The whole genre of ‘walking simulators.’
That one about the mountain.
As a piece of satire, this game falls woefully short. As a piece of entertainment software, this game falls woefully short. As a game, Soda Drinker Pro falls woefully short.
The great problem here is that even the weakest of the games in Soda Drinker Pro’s satirical sites is orders of magnitude more entertaining than this game. Soda Drinker pro exhibits no polish, engenders no excitement, and offers no reward. It is not quirky or zany, it’s not clever or funny, it’s not challenging and it teaches us nothing.
Wandering from one poorly rendered location to the next, listening to badly digitised samples and screechingly awful chiptunes, occasionally holding down a trigger to raise your soda drink and tilt it slightly towards the camera. If we were feeling exceedingly charitable we might call this a failed Virtual Reality tech demo. But we’re not, because we just sat through another twenty minutes of the game to see if we’d missed something, to see if we got the joke.
We did not.
There are no redeeming features here. None. Trawl the Internet and you will find hundreds of positive user comments, every one of them along the lines of “This is the greatest soda drinking simulation available.” Stop it. Please. You are not being funny. You are perpetuating the myth that because a thing exists it has some inherent worth.
It does not.
Soda Drinker Pro is not free. You will have to pay to experience it – $9.99. Doubtless there are some who may willingly offer up real world money – money that could buy several real sodas, or given to the charity of their choice, or set ablaze – in the belief that this review is too harsh and the expectation that this game must be worth what the publishers are charging.
It is not.
Soda Drinker Pro is an interactive experience. So is sticking a fork in your eye. We do not recommend either.
What we do recommend, though, is walking into the house on level two. There you will find something more worthy
of consideration.
The developer provided us with a copy of the game for evaluation purposes, though we cannot fathom why.
Soda Drinker Pro has been delisted on Xbox as far as we can tell, but is available on Steam.
Not clever enough to be satirical and not funny enough to be a joke.
Not clever enough to be satirical and not funny enough to be a joke.About The Author
