Game Review: Goosebumps Horror Town (Mobile – Free to Play)

Goosebumps Horror Town is a free to play mobile game based off the hugely popular R.L. Stine book series. Build your own town and fill with all of the scariest monsters from the Goosebumps series. This review is for version 1.04.

Taking the core ‘builder’ setup prominent in so many free to play mobile games. Goosebumps Horror Town gives it a different spin by including a monsters vs humans type of gameplay. Or at least that’s what it promises. The end result is just a load of tasks and timers. Something that you should expect in these types of games now.

As well as building houses and stores, you can also unlock and build monster homes and unleash them on the humans that live there. Scaring them will see you obtain materials for one of the many meters that exist in the game, specifically the scare meter. Fill this to unlock small premium rewards.

Set tasks for your humans to unlock new items for your inventory and collect coins. These are used to buy new areas, new buildings and unleashing the monsters. The game is pretty generous with coins but the quickest way to get more is to sell inventory items to the store. In fact, after a while it’s a requirement as your inventory has limited space which can be upgraded at a premium cost.

It’s one of many restrictions the game has and the more you play, the more limiting it becomes. Many buildings cost the premium currency of dollars (such as Slappy’s house – something all who play are going to naturally want), timers can be sped up for dollars and entire tasks can be skipped provided you’re willing to spend.

Which brings us to the usual problem with a game like this…the in-app purchases. Goosebumps Horror Town sticks to the formula and starts with 50 dollars for £1.99 going up to 4000 for £99.99. No surprises here, every major release goes for greed over sense. Just remember that this is a game that is asking a penny short of £100 for a finite amount of fake currency. Those 4000 dollars will run out and quickly when you look at the costs of some of the items.

So, let’s spend some and see what you get. Let’s say you bought Slappy’s house, The Snowman’s house, Theo Gordon’s house and Andrew Craw’s house. These four monster houses all come to an eye-wateringly high 830 in-game dollars. The nearest amount is 630 dollars for £19.99 or you could pay £48.99 for 1700. Shocking huh?

But hey, you don’t have to pay if you don’t want too of course. You can pick up the small amount the game occasionally gives out. All while waiting hours and hours to complete tasks and hopefully find the correct item you need to progress. Like all of these games, you’ll quickly wonder just what is the point?

Let’s also keep this is in mind when talking about these in-app purchases. This is a game that is aimed a certain age group that is likely to be more inclined to want things to be faster. Why else would one of the major series characters be locked behind the premium currency?

All of that aside, it’s nothing special as the game plays the same hand as all town builder games. It’s pretty enough and does feel like you’re playing a Goosebumps game though! It’s definitely better than many of the other games in this genre but that really isn’t much praise when you consider how much of a wasteland the free to play model is.