No Red T-Shirts iPad Review

Namco Networks' No Red T-Shirts contains a silly premise that doesn't translate into a quality game. You play as a malfunctioning police bot that aims to eliminate fun at all costs. To that end, you spend less time catching actual criminals in exchange for making the lives of relatively happy townsfolk miserable. No listening to music, no dog walking, no sky-diving and so on and so forth. The concept is worth a chuckle. As for the $2.99 asking price, not so much.

Each stage plays almost exactly the same. The game flashes an icon representing an offense, and you swipe left and right around different 3D environments searching for the "perpetrators", whereupon which you tap as many as possible before the developers switch things up. See a hopscotch symbol? That means you should hunt down people drawing on the street. A camera? Search for folks taking pictures. Did it start to rain? Seek people carrying umbrellas. Then, at certain points when the sun goes down, you haphazardly poke the screen to send everyone to bed. The better you perform, the more cogs (the game's currency) you earn, used to upgrade the police bot's gadgets and purchase shops that produce new criminals.

Problem is, No Red T-Shirts isn't much fun to play. The tap controls fail to work, especially with pogo stick jumpers, and even when things run smoothly, the actual gameplay gets old. Seriously, how much tapping can a person do until they pass out from boredom? It's a shame the app's so disappointing. We kept expecting it to throw us some sort of curve that would enhance the experience, but instead, we just kept tapping people carrying newspapers and cell phones.

Meanwhile, the graphics look terrible. The game opens with low-res 2D images, then drops you into crude 3D environments populated by block-headed characters. It's very Nintendo 64, which is somewhat of an insult to Nintendo and its long-deceased console.

Sure, one could make the argument that No Red T-Shirts is strictly for kids, but we'd like to think that even children beyond the age of three would expect a game with more depth. That said, Namco Networks would be wise to drop the price to $0.99 immediately, though on the downside, we still wouldn't recommend this mundane and largely forgettable title.

Review code provided by Namco Bandai.

Download No Red T-Shirts (iOS)