Developer: FreshPlanet
Publisher: Gameloft
Platform: Switch, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: Switch
SongPop Party – Review
Over the course of the last few years, party games have been rising in popularity again. We have tried out many different titles, ranging from the frantic cooking action in Overcooked! and chopping up humans in Cannibal Cuisine, to more traditional party games such as The Game of Life 2 and Mario Party Superstars. Now, however, we’re trading in our cooking utensils and our dice to listen to iconic songs from the past, famous movies, or just current pop hits in SongPop Party. For this review will be ditching our traditional review format, as this title is all about the music, and of course the quizzing mechanics.
As the name may imply, SongPop Party is a party game that’s all about music. This title is in fact a quiz game, and you can play it versus AI opponents or against friends and family when playing locally. The game also has online modes, but we had the most fun when playing the game with our loved ones. You’ll be able to choose a fixed number of rounds, and then for each round you can pick a category. You can choose between iconic movie soundtracks, current hits, oldies, rock songs, and so on. The game will reward you with experience for each of your correct answers, and by playing the game more and more, you’ll earn keys. With these keys, you can unlock new playlists, which means you’ll have even more content to dive into. You can also use the keys for cosmetic upgrades, such as unlocking new avatars. It’s all very basic, but very amusing nonetheless. There is a lot of extra content to unlock, but we could have done without seeing Wonderwall by Oasis in nearly every old-school playlist.
The music on offer is extremely varied, and it’s sometimes just a lot of fun picking categories that you are not familiar with. It’s amusing to see people just randomly guess, and it’s even more entertaining when you’re going toe to toe with a friend or family member. The UI for the game is also very clear, and the controls are also very easy to remember. Each player will require a controller or a smartphone to join in. The smartphone will have you swipe the phone’s screen in order to select the right answer. We did notice that this was a bit slower compared to playing with a controller. Nonetheless, this option was a very welcome addition, as not everyone has many extra controllers lying around.
Overall, everything is very nicely handled but the game did lag from time to time, especially when browsing the menus. This wasn’t really an issue, but it was very noticeable. On top of that, even though the game is only just out for Nintendo Switch, we saw a lot of content from previous events that we could not unlock anymore. We reckon this was content for the mobile version of the game, and we assume this game was just a simple port. We hope that Switch players will still get the chance to unlock this unavailable content, or that this just gets removed from the menus.
Conclusion
SongPop Party is a very amusing and entertaining party game. While the game also allows you to take on AI opponents, we had a great time when playing against friends and family. The game is properly optimized to be played with a larger group of people, and even when we didn’t have enough Switch controllers, other people could still join in using their smartphone as a controller. We loved the fairly diverse library of songs, and we can see ourselves revisiting this game many more times in the future.
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