Woho World is a management sim about running a sunny island resort that begins with a typical tutorial. The tutorial asks you to purchase a Ghost House from the store and put it on your island, so you know how to purchase and place buildings. Diligently I clicked upon the store, but what I found there was distressing. The purchase arrow was pointing not to a Ghost House, but to a River Drift ride. Purchasing and placing the River Drift did not satisfy the tutorial. Scouring the atore revealed that the Ghost House the game wished me to purchase was a locked item that wouldn’t be available to me until I reached level 22.
Woho World is a management sim about running a sunny island resort that begins with a typical tutorial. The tutorial asks you to purchase a Ghost House from the store and put it on your island, so you know how to purchase and place buildings. Diligently I clicked upon the store, but what I found there was distressing. The purchase arrow was pointing not to a Ghost House, but to a River Drift ride. Purchasing and placing the River Drift did not satisfy the tutorial. Scouring the atore revealed that the Ghost House the game wished me to purchase was a locked item that wouldn’t be available to me until I reached level 22.
I stared at my computer screen in bafflement. I tried to purchase the Ghost House, to no avail. I can’t buy a Ghost House until I am level 22. I presumably cannot level up until I finish the tutorial… but I can’t finish the tutorial because it’s not possible to buy a Ghost House. Eventually, I discovered that Woho World‘s developers at some point found out about the broken tutorial quest, because there is a button that lets you skip tutorial steps without completing them. Yes, that’s clearly a much better way to fix the tutorial than, say, having it ask you to buy an item that it is possible to buy.
As you might surmise from the tutorial description, Woho World is not a particularly great game. What it’s going for is a combination of sunny resort sim management in the vein of Resort World mixed with the ability to interact with tourists more directly, as in Hello City. You make people happy, you build attractions, you make money, you invest that money in making more people happy. There’s no quest structure in place to give you a road map for building up your resort and many game mechanics are simply unexplained. For instance, you can hire a maid to keep your resort clean for you, but I’m not sure how this is better than just logging in and picking up trash.
Woho World is not entirely without charm, though. The beach sound effects are soothing and, once you’re past the botched tutorial, the game runs relatively well. Lots of animations make your little island feel alive. You can see tourists wander around as well as the boats and planes that bring fresh batches of tourist to your resort. Your starting island has an animated waterfall but most of the buildings you can buy early on aren’t animated. You can buy some animated attractions and animals, but in some cases the animated elements are so small they’re hard to see unless you zoom way in.
It’s not impossible to have fun with Woho World, but this is one of those games that’s so basic it’s hard to imagine why someone would choose to play this over a host of other, similar options. Nothing about the basic gameplay or the game’s visuals stands out as special and the broken tutorial is off-putting. You don’t even really get to build interesting buildings. Of course, if it’s still dark and cold where you live at this time of year, Woho World might be entertaining just as a reminder that sandy beaches and sunny skies are still out there somewhere.
