Pummel Party at its core tries to put a spin on the familiar Mario Party formula, and it does do that, just not exceptionally well. It has only 5 maps to pick from, and while its 38 mini-games might seem generous (for an indie title), many of the mini-games are just imitations of pre-existing games or are too similar to one another warrant any special praise. Pummel Party doesn't reallyPummel Party at its core tries to put a spin on the familiar Mario Party formula, and it does do that, just not exceptionally well. It has only 5 maps to pick from, and while its 38 mini-games might seem generous (for an indie title), many of the mini-games are just imitations of pre-existing games or are too similar to one another warrant any special praise. Pummel Party doesn't really have that replay value that you would want from a party game, having only played a few rounds of the game I can safely say that I don’t really have a strong urge to go back and play it again anytime soon. While the game itself is fun to play with friends, I found that after having played about three games I had already seen everything there was to offer. The mini games themselves vary drastically in quality, and many merely imitate pre-existing games, examples include:
1. Bouncing Balls: Pong
2. Rockin Rhythm: Guitar Hero/Tap Tap Hero
3. Temporal Trails: Light Bike
4. Strategic Shockwave: Bomber Man
There are mini-games which involve racing, but because there’s no items to use, no ways of interrupting or distracting your competitors, and no alternate paths to use to try gain shortcuts, most of these races are pretty much set in stone from the moment the race begins. There is also no variation in the layout of the maps for each mini-game, so you will play the exact same map each time you replay a mini-game. So the people who are able to memorize the maps and or simply get in the lead because someone else falls off the track or something will pretty much have an unshakeable advantage. These maps include:
1. Rotor Race
2. Miniature Motors
3. Slippery Sprint
4. Rusty Racers
Also some mini-games have the players all dodge obstacles until one is left standing, many of them feel extremely samey and get repetitive quickly. These include:
1. Breaking Block
2. Cannon Circle
3. Bullet Barrage
4. Laser Leap
5. Searing Searchlights
6. Spooky Spikes
That isn’t to say all of the mini-games are bad, even the ones just mentioned aren’t bad, they’re just not particularly amazing either. If you’ve got a good group to play with you will have fun with this game, I guarantee it.
The actual board game side of things is standard, you collect a token of sorts which are bought with currency and whoever has the most of these tokens wins. What’s interesting however is the HP mechanic. Traps found on the map and items which players can use on their turns to attack their opponents all deplete player HP. If a player’s health reaches 0 they respawn at a point far away from the next token and lose a considerable amount of keys (the in-game currency). When characters take damage some of their keys are dropped nearby where they died, and players who walk past can pick them up. The items and killing your friends was probably my favourite part of the game, and offered the greatest variety in how you played the game.
The game’s visuals are simple and clean, and get the job done just fine. There’s nothing here to blow you away, but some of the background environments were particularly nice at times. I didn’t have any performance issues with the game but my friends and I did run into a few bugs which included crashes, not being able to move after rolling the die, awkward pauses after turns were taken on the board, glitched rag-dolling and some other minor bugs.
My biggest problem with this game which I cannot stress is enough, is not being able to rejoin a game if you have to leave or lag out. If people are busy and need to leave or lag out for whatever reason, just let an AI take over their spot until they get back and let them rejoin. The game does have a save system, but we couldn’t really figure out how to save and the save files weren’t always there, so I assume there’s some type of auto-save thing going on. It was confusing. Also, the biggest problem with this system is that players have to join in the same order that they did before, otherwise they’ll play as a different character. For example: If P1 has 20 keys and P2 has 0 keys while playing, but then you load the save and P2 gets in the game first and P1 gets in the game second, P2 will have 20 keys and P1 will have 0 keys.
There really isn’t too much else to say about this one. It’s fun for what it is, and I would recommend it to people who love party games/board games, but for its asking price there really isn’t enough replay value or overall quality to justify the asking price.… Expand
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