DJ Rivals | Life of Android

The Story

Bland Corp and its henchmen have taken over Nightclub City and it’s your job, as a gigging DJ, to reclaim the music from Bland Corp’s DJ Drones. You’ll have to use your best moves as you progress through the game from Bass Drops, to Crossfades, to Scratching. Battle through your local area, or a location of your choice, complete all the quests and beat all nine bosses to win.

The Experience

Fire up DJ Rivals and you might be surprised to see your GPS icon light up. That’s because the app uses your GPS coordinates to put you in your local area with genuine locations to DJ in. It’s a nice touch, although, the locations you’ll be DJing in end up as varied as golf shops, garden centres and even petting zoos. It seems to take a fairly random sample of businesses as opposed to local nightspots. Still, it helps to make things a little more personal.

You start your career as a relatively green DJ with few skills and even fewer moves. As you progress through the game, you get the opportunity to buy more moves and equipment, allowing you to take on more accomplished drones and earn more money. In each chapter, you have to complete a number of tasks before the final showdown with each chapter’s boss.

As you can imagine, it takes time to progress through the game, and part of that is that once your stamina drops below a certain level, you need to replenish it before taking on any new DJ battles. That can be done in one of two ways – you can either stop playing for a few hours and allow your stamina to recover on its own, or you can use ‘ice’ to pay for a stamina boost. Ice can be won throughout the game, but it can also be bought, using real world money. So it’s either a case of patiently waiting it out, playing for an hour or so at a time, and then waiting for your stamina to return, or you could buy your way through the game.

DJ Rivals is a decent little game that has bags of longevity, although the gameplay can get a little samey, with scratching, crossfading and like being simply a case of hitting the right buttons at the right time, a little like Guitar Hero’s UI. Perhaps because of its length, there needs to be a little more variety before it becomes a game you just can’t put down. As it is, die-hard dance music fans may well find the time to play it to the end, but it’ll take some dedication for the rest of us. Still, as free games go, this is one of the prettiest out there.