The Oregon Trail

For many of us, Oregon Trail brings back warm fuzzy memories from our childhood. The game was challenging, you had to conserve your  resources to survive the long journey.

Even though most of my classmates, including myself, would die long before reaching our destination, we’d always look forward to giving it another go to see if we could best our previous score/distance traveled, reaching the end filled us with a great sense of achievement.

Gameloft has released a remake of the classic, The Oregon Trail, with modernized graphics and new mini-games for the iPhone and iPod touch, but does this game live up to the original?

In Oregon Trail you start out by selecting your preferences type of wagon, family member names, season to start journey, your profession, etc. After you set out on your journey the game will ease you into each of the mini-games. The first mini-game you’ll play is hunting. In hunting mode, you’ll have a top-down view of your character.

Tap on any animals that appear on the screen, once the animal is shot a chicken leg will appear, tap on it to retrieve the food. Other mini-games include fishing, hammering nails for wagon repair, harvesting berries, etc.

Overall I found the mini-games lack any real challenge, even on hard mode they seemed a bit too easy. I ran this by a few of my co-workers (people that don’t play games all the time) I had them perform the challenges, and they aced all of them with ease.

Another aspect that bothered me about Oregon Trail was the excessive loading, the load times aren’t long, but it’s just that they happen so frequently, and the occasional crash doesn’t help either.

Overall I had a poor experience with Oregon Trail, the game felt too repetitive, it was just a series of mini-games. It really lacked that sense of challenge the original had. On the upside, I did enjoy the graphics they looked very nice.

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