Publisher: Legacy Interactive
Developer: Paramount Digital Entertainment
Minimum requirements: Windows XP or Vista, 1 GHz processor with an accelerated 3D graphics card, 512 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0c or newer compatible sound card
Genre: Puzzle
Release date: Available now

High School. These words sometimes bring out the best of memories, and at other times they bring out the worst of them. Being the new kid in school can either be either a nightmare or an adventure. Legacy Interactive’s Mean Girls turns new-kid fears into a flashy puzzle game.

Mean Girls is based on the 2004 movie starring Lindsay Lohan. You are the new girl in school, and you meet another girl named Janis. She wants you to infiltrate a group of popular girls called the Plastics and help her to bring them down. Regina, the leader of the Plastics, runs the school, and you have to figure out ways to manipulate the other students around you and use things such as rumors and gossip against her.

Mean Girls plays exactly like a Puzzle Quest game. You and your opponent play on the same puzzle screen in a minigame called a Showdown. You win a Showdown by either decreasing your opponent’s stamina or increasing their affection. You do this by matching three identical symbols in a row. This either empties their stamina bar or fills up their affection bar, earning you points that you can spend to deploy your skills, which upgrade every time you level.

Mean Girls is entertaining, but only for about 10 minutes. The showdowns, in which you puzzle-fight other students, are extremely easy. Some of the skills you learn are much too powerful, such as “Wig Out,” which destroys your opponent by randomly selecting nine symbols and adding their effects to your character. The game also has a paper-doll look. It’s not a big-budget game that pushes a video card to the max, but characters need to be able to do more than just bend their arms. The music and voices are just plain terrible and in-game choices are supposed to align you to good or evil, but it didn’t seem as if any of the choices I made affected my moral orientation.

It’s not all bad, however, (only a few tiny parts), as you can choose between four different characters, and there are a few side quests you can explore during the main story, which did offer some small sense of adventure. There is also a strategic element to the game that I found to be rather enjoyable.

Mean Girls tries to appeal to all teens, but it’s really targeted at young girls, match-three casual-game players and fans of the movie. It’s an easy, straightforward game that offers very little entertainment.

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