Campaign: The Game for the iPhone puts an interesting spin to simulating an ad agency coming up from the 1980s. What caught my eye was how the game’s retro graphics portrayed ad-agency life to be utterly retro, whimsical and at the same time, totally awesome.

There are plenty of throwbacks to stuff such as Star Trek (clients beams in and out ala Spock), Back to the Future (there’s a DeLorean parked outside the office), zombie movies and many more. Even handling the nitty-gritty stuff such as hiring staff and ideation for campaigns are made easy through selection screens.

Players earn diamonds and hiring stars whenever they complete a campaign. Each ad campaign has a certain demographic to appeal to and players will need to combine themes and what we call now as media buys for maximum impact. With more hiring stars earned, players can hire better staff which contribute to better agency ratings.

Campaign: The Game progresses linearly, with each year ending in an awards ceremony, putting the player’s ad agency in competition with other “virtual” ad agencies. Strangely for a game that is set in 1980, some of the clients within the game would demand for an iPad app as part of their campaign revisions. LOL. Talk about being way ahead of the curve.

Some players may not like the simplicity expounded by the gameplay elements in Campaign: The Game, preferring a more hardcore simulation, but for me, this allows for short bursts of casual gaming goodness without too much thinking involve. Campaign: The Game get a 4 out of 5 from us at Nineoverten.com, and it’s worth checking out.

The game is available for USD 1.99 on the iTunes App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/campaign-the-game/id523201620?mt=8. A review code was provided to Nineoverten.com for the purpose of this review.