So, I know what you're thinking, what's Smashbomb? Smashbomb is a pretty cool social media app for entertainment recommendations. What do I mean? Movie Reviews. Well, you can rate and review all kinds of things like movies, tv shows, books and more; as well as discover things through recommendations too. You can also recommend stuff to your friends and follow each other to see what stuff they've recently reviewed. Find out what they love or what they hate, or what they really felt about a certain movie/tv show, etc.. You can even join "Orbs" which are groups where you can talk with other members about different topics related to recommendations. You earn points for adding reviews and rating things and even earn different badges for contributing that show off your status in the community. There's even a system of points called Kudos points that you earn for adding reviews and ratings and the more you earn the more you can give to friends and followers. These points are used to enter giveaways where you can win all kinds of prizes from Funko Pops, DVDs, table top games and even video games.
Of course it's not perfect...
The Cons -
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The back button - when I press the back button it doesn't work or function in taking me to the last screen or a back action; instead it exits the app. This isn't a big deal but kind of sucks sometimes. Maybe it has something to do with me having Android.
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When writing a review, if you accidently exit app, there isn't a save function or something like a draft of what you were working on that you can go back to. Something like that would be helpful not to lose something you were working on by accident.
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Since it's a relatively new app, the community is a little small and somethings have little to no reviews.
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The prizes/giveaways seem a bit infrequent and less than I thought there would be.
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The daily missions need a little work. They seem kind of random instead of based on things similar to what you've rated or reviewed.
And of course:
The Pros -
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This app looks good and is really easy to use. I of course like that you can review and rate pretty much anything, making it a one stop destination for reviews on anything from books, movies, tv shows, apps, music, podcasts, tabletop games, video games, tech and even YouTube channels.
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When you add a review you can add a section for pros and cons, which is pretty cool, or add a picture or video; even a URL for a YouTube video.
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You can write as much as you want. Write a quality review or a couple of sentences, or just give something a rating.
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If something hasn't been added, you can easily add it yourself and be the first person to rate/review it and recommend it to others.
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Who else is giving you real actual rewards for letting people know what you think. And the rewards are pretty cool: Funko Pops, Dvds, tabletop games, and even video games.
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Free T-shirt when you get to 1,000 points.
So in conclusion, I think this app is pretty awesome. I've been using it now for a couple of weeks and have really been enjoying it. It's pretty fun adding reviews for movies and shows I've seen, earning points towards winning awards and also giving points to other people writing reviews helping them get more points to win stuff too. And the best is just finding something cool that you haven't heard about before like a movie or tv show you were thinking about watching but weren't sure about. Because there's nothing that sucks like staring at the menu screen at Netflix/Hulu/Prime etc... and not knowing what to watch and just staring at that screen for 15 mins. Especially with things like fake reviews and trolls out there and paid reviews that hype up a movie that you wind up spending good money on seeing in theaters only to feel like you were robbed. It's a cool place to get some good opinions and if you get your friends to join or add in the fun then you will be able to see and share your reviews, ratings with each other and actually know who they're coming from.
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