Originally posted December 26th on the Seafoam Gaming Forums

Title:Chat A Lot

System: 3DS (eShop)

Price: $7.99

Release date: 11/20/2014

The main game

This is a communication application that promises to allow you and some friends to talk and hang out with each other. It seems simple enough, like a replacement for swapnote. With two options for communication, text chat and voice chat, it seems like a great tool to have! But is it? Let’s find out.

Graphics

Pretty simplistic. You can choose from a selection of animals and colors to set as your avatar, before going to find friends on your 3DS friend list who own the app to add in-game. The navigation is a bit rough, and my friend and I had a bit of trouble finding exactly how to do anything at first, but we eventually got the hang of it.

Gameplay

Text chat is self explanatory. Type in phrases and communicate with friends. Nothing you couldn’t find anywhere else to be honest, but it works for the most part. My friend and I had no problem talking over text when we played this app for review.

The other major communication option, Voice chat is where the game is supposed to shine. Swapnote had limited voice chat options, and the 6th gen Pokemon games have voice chat options that are pretty simple, so this could have been the definitive voice chat application for the 3DS system. Sadly this option suffers from numerous problems I encountered during testing. Me and my friend often had problems hearing each other, even though we were very close to our wifi routers and had no problems with pokemon’s voice chat. When we could hear each other, it was of poor quality and would cut out often. You can draw on the bottom screen while chatting, which we found amusing at best, but overall voice chat just didn’t work well at all. Considering I only tried it with one other person, I can’t bear to imagine how much trouble I would have had with two other people.

Conclusion

In the end, Chat-A-Lot is a weird mess. The text chat option is simple enough, and it works very well, but it’s nothing you couldn’t find anywhere else, and the voice chat doesn’t work too good at all. Combine that with the high price of $7.99, and this is an app to avoid at all costs, unless it gets a HUGE price drop later down the line. I give Chat-A-Lot a 3 out of 10

Thanks to Teyon for the review code.