Developer: Petoons Studio
Publisher: Petoons Studio, Petoons Studio SL
Platforms: PC, Switch, Xbox One, PS4
Tested on: Switch
Petoons Party (Switch) – Review
Nintendo’s consoles have always been the perfect medium for multiplayer games like Mario Kart, Mario Party and many others. Now, Petoons Party has come to the Nintendo Switch, which seems like the perfect system to play these types of games on. A game that resembles Mario Party a lot but also differs in quite some areas. Like Mario Party, Petoons Party is a digital board game with minigames after each player’s turn to spice things up. While the concept is certainly okay, the execution could have been a lot better.
Story
There’s no real story content present in this game aside from the small background story of the evil Kitra that wants to conquer the island of Kimera and steal the Petoon’s magic to control their world. The Petoons need your help to face the evil Kitra, so you play a game on this island full of minigames. At the end of each board is a space where you can confront the evil Kitra in a minigame where you need to work together with your opponents to defeat her. That’s all there is to the story content but in this type of game, you won’t really miss it. This whole backstory is only read in the prefaces on digital stores, this won’t be told in-game.
Graphics
The game looks alright if we’re talking about looks. The characters all have a funny design that can be customized with costumes that can be unlocked after you’ve played a few games. Each board has its own theme and looks like a typical Mario Party board with different colors for each type of space to indicate its effect, but the boards all look rather bland and could use some extra decorations. Overall the graphics aren’t high quality but this isn’t necessary for this type of game. Each board will give its own theme to each minigame present in Petoons Party.
Sound
The sounds in Petoons Party are comprised of short, rather annoyingly repetitive bits of music. The music at the loading screen is literally comprised of twenty notes that are played in repeat mode that could get annoying pretty fast. There are no extra tracks at the main menu or in-game so you’ll be hearing the same music throughout the whole game.
Gameplay
Petoons Party is a party game In which you play against friends or the AI on a game board where you move forward and play minigames to get the highest amount of points at the end of the game. There are four boards available to choose from, each having a different layout and theme. The game is quite similar to games from the Mario Party series but with a lot less to do. At the start of the game, each player will roll a dice to see who will begin on the board. Each turn, players roll a dice to move forward on the game board and standing on different spaces will have a variety of effects. On the board, there are positive spaces and negative spaces. The positive ones will grant you points or let you roll the dice again to move forward. The negative spaces will take points from you or let you roll a dice to move backward. Different from Mario Party is that you can’t choose how many turns you want to play as each board has an end point. Here you will need to work together with your opponents to defeat Kitra in the last minigame. Losing against Kitra and not retrying to defeat Kitra will result in the game returning to the main menu with not even a bit of the results or a winner of the board game itself.
Each board has its own set of minigames. You would expect that each board would have other minigames to play, but that is not quite right. Each board will give its own theme to the minigames, but in reality, there are only nine minigames to play in this whole game. In eight of these games, you play against each other while the last is the “boss fight” against Kitra where you need to work together for a change. When you start your first game, all but one minigame will be locked. When you progress with your opponents on the board, you will unlock new minigames when you pass the blue spaces. If you and your opponents manage to be unable to pass a minigame space, you will be stuck playing the same minigame again until you’ve reached that first minigame space. When the game runs on its normal speed, the progress of the game is really slow. Luckily, there’s an acceleration button to speed things up, but this wouldn’t have been necessary if the game speed could be turned up just a bit. Before each minigame, there will be a loading screen that will take up a lot of time which can be really annoying.
The minigames, in particular, aren’t that innovative either. You’ll have to plow through minigames that aren’t even fun to play. The controls in these games aren’t that good either as the characters will move around quite statically while you would expect something a lot better than this. Like in Mario Party, each minigame gets an explanation of the controls before you start. These explanations are comprised of a single screen with some drawings of the controls that look like a child made them. These explanations are quite unclear and most of the time, you need to play a minigame and lose before you really understand what you need to do. In one minigame, you need to cross a river and pick up small critters of your own color and bring them over to the other side. With the explanation, it’s quite unclear that you not only need to pick up critters and take them to the other side, but they also need to be of your own color too, which is indicated by a small circle around your player icon on the top of the screen. Playing against an AI opponent could mean rather significant losses during your first few attempts. The developers probably knew that eight minigames would be a small amount that would bore players pretty quickly, so they added the option to skip the minigames by just quitting the minigame, while this should be the most important element in this game.
Conclusion
When you look at Petoons Party when you see it in eShop, or when you see a trailer, the game looks like it could be a lot of fun. Sadly, not much of this is true. The slow gameplay on the board and the long loading screens don’t do the game much good. With only eight minigames to play while advancing on the board make the game even duller, because when you’ve played these games once or twice, the chances are you don’t want to play them anymore. This eventually results in you tossing the game aside, ready for another adventure elsewhere. This game feels like it’s finished quickly because it just lacks a big amount of minigames and the overall gameplay could have been done much better.
Petoons Party (Switch) - Review,
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