Do you want to be the world’s top fashion designer? Well, you can forget about four years of school and all the intensive labor. I became a top fashion designer in just two hours in Atari’s Project Runway for the Nintendo Wii.
The premise of Lifetime’s Project Runway is to become the world’s next “hot” fashion designer. Within the video-game adaptation though, players take over the roles of designer, model and stylist. Having the ability to mix and match clothes, apply makeup and then walk the runway, Project Runway should’ve been the perfect combination of features for fans of the show. Instead, what it turns out to be is a miserable title that had the Project Runway slapped on the front cover for the sake of licensing to earn a few extra dollars.
The idea about Project Runway should be to put forth quality pieces for the runway, but the problem here is that outfits put together that are winning pieces are atrocious. The game provides a few outlines that players must adhere to, and once that is done, they are whisked away to apply ridiculous makeup onto their models. Not only does the player have an easy job winning – especially since applying makeup revolves around waving the controller with no precision – but the title offers no replay value.
Weighing in at a little under two hours long, Project Runway’s Season Mode is a waste of time. There was never a time that the competition felt stiff and gave my designs or model a run for their money. It’s almost as if I could’ve played this title blindfolded and still walked away as the season winner. There’s nothing more aggravating than having the sense that the time spent on a video game turned out to be a gigantic waste of time.
The presentation values of Project Runway are among the worst I have seen for any licensed video game titles. While I’m not able to confirm if Tim Gunn, Heidi Klum, Nina Garcia or Michael Kors provided voice acting to the title, their voices within the game all had a familiar feeling to them as if they were ripped straight from the television show. Beyond that, each other show’s stars are represented by a cropped image rather than a 3D rendering of their likeness. Having such low presentation values, it’s as if Atari had the game sitting on the shelf for a long time and then decided to buy the rights to the show and dedicated a week of their time to implementing traces of the property throughout the title.
The most intense portion of Project Runway occurred when the player has to assume the role of the model. Walking down the runway, players have to swing their Wii remotes and nunchuks in synch with the corresponding commands on the screen. If you were to watch someone play as a bystander, you’d think they were attempting to orchestrate music.
With so little to do in Project Runway, it’s hard to recommend the title to anyone. The graphics are beyond outdated and give off the impression of the prehistoric age of video games. The music is ungodly annoying and the presentation gives off the vibes that Atari is trying to make a quick buck.
