Go Vacation

For families looking to have a good time with their Wii's this winter, I highly recommend taking a trip to Kawawii Island with Go Vacation. It may is not the best sounding or the prettiest game out there but Go Vacation packs in a wealth of fun for every member of the family.

I'm always on the lookout for family-oriented games I can recommend to my sister and her husband and son, and I would recommend Go Vacation in a heartbeat-it's a title that utilizes every first-party peripheral a family might have gathered, the games are easy enough for younger children (with assistance) while still being entertaining for adults, and each Resort is vibrant and colorful, with lots of nooks, crannies and genuinely beautiful spots that made me wish I had a "take a screenshot option" for anywhere in the game.

A quality collection of mini-games that should appeal more to single-player fans.

If you're looking for a great multiplayer game to play with friends and family, Go Vacation is an extremely solid choice. The developer made a few strange choices that hurt the experience, but overall Go Vacation is a trip worth taking.

Loads of solid mini-games. [Christmas 2011, p.94]

The collection of games are all pretty varied, and tie in well with each resort.

If you're the sort of person for whom playing games on the Wii usually involves more than one person sitting or standing in front of your TV, you should give Go Vacation a look.

Go Vacation with its numerous activities and beautiful environment offers more than many of its competitors. Not all the mini games are equally fun, which is often due to controls. While there's some appeal specifically for singleplayer, it's obviously the multiplayer aspect that promises good entertainment.

Go Vacation is a good alternative to Wii Sports Resort.

Go Vacation is no doubt one of the best family games for Wii, thanks to its open world gameplay and the fifty minigames included. You can reach the place of your next activity by riding an ATV or a waterbike, and play with up to three friends via split-screen, and that's cool. What's not-so-cool is the overall quality of the minigames themselves, since some of them are boring.

Its outward appearance may seem kiddy, but Go Vacation is surprisingly deep for a minigame collection. [Nov 2011, p.77]

Although Go Vacation certainly has its moments of intense fun, I found the lack of polish disappointing. All in all, it makes for a nod-worthy effort that boasts numerous triumphs, but ultimately never turns out quite as good as it could have.

It's accessible to everyone and sometimes quite funny, sadly not all the minigames have the same verve.

Go Vacation is a shallow, kid-friendly minigame collection with nice open spaces and overly simplistic games.

Go Vacation is yet another Wii Sports wannabe, but one with plenty of content. The mission structure means the game is actually playable on your own, even if it obviously works best with friends.

I commend Namco for trying to make Go Vacation more than a minigame collection. It's a shame that they seem to have lost site of why people buy minigame collections. Additionally, the frustrating open-world system that exists without any sort of way to directly access the game you want is a serious misstep.

As a mini-game compilation, Go Vacation falls short of the standard set by Wii Sports Resort due to its middling selection of activities and its frustrating motion controls; as a sandbox game, however, it fares significantly better, offering up four expansive resorts to explore and a myriad of collectibles to find. While its extensive use of gesture commands nearly ruins the entire experience, there is still quite a bit of fun to be had with the title, particularly if you have a companion to share it with.

Looks like it should be fun but the minigames are mostly sub-Monkey Ball rubbish and the controls leave us as cold as Kawawii's frosty peaks. [Nov 2011, p.60]

Go Vacation has a lot of different mini-games but frankly we've seen it all before. The exploration aspect really is the only original thing in this game. The multiplayer can be a lot of fun, but the controls aren't as good as other games, like Wii Sports Resort.

Another mini-game collection designed for young children and families. With Go Vacation, Namco Bandai tried to make something different, but they forgot one main ingredient in the recipe: the fun.

Go Vacation is perhaps the 20th party game I've tried on the Wii system. You would think that these games would have to evolve to give us new experiences, but the truth is that very few titles actually do. Go Vacation is not bad if you're a bunch of people who want to have fun – but you played it all before.

It's simply been done before and done better -- and will probably be revisited again in the future via Kinect or Move.

Quotation forthcoming.

Perhaps this would have been a cute little game half a decade ago, but so close to the end of the Wii's life cycle, it smacks of Namco desperately trying to milk the minigame cow one last time. As an ironic celebration of the Wii's most compelling and infamous problem, Go Vacation's selection of tepid and shallow activities might serve some amusing merit, but I don't think even the "family demographic" this is aimed at could find much to enjoy here.

Go Vacation's main problem is that its controls are, nine times out of ten, too unresponsive to make it any fun.

Had Namco Bandai polished the controls in Go Vacation and slapped a $29 price tag on the box, I'd recommend a used copy. Unfortunately, the game is not something worth playing.