Developer: Toyful Games
Publisher: Nighthawk Interactive
Platform: Switch
Tested on: Switch
Very Very Valet – Review
Party games have been on the rise like never before since Overcooked! showed us that simple and funny, but engaging gameplay, meant a lot more than just trying to create a complex experience to entice players into buying a product. Soon, more and more ‘clones’ followed, each adding its own unique mechanics. Over the last few years, we have made kitchens unsafe in the Overcooked! series, we have battled alien warships in Catastronauts, but we have also trashed complete living rooms in Moving Out, while renovating in Tools Up! (Let’s not forget serving airplane food in Shakes on a Plane or eating human flesh in Cannibal Cuisine.) Now, with our cooking supplies, laser weapons, toolkits, and jet fuel safely stored away, we were ready to become valets in Very Very Valet. The game shifts to the proper gear, but never truly reaches its max speed to become truly memorable.
Story
While there are a few small text blurbs present in Very Very Valet, the story is non-existent. It’s fun that the game does try to speak to its player, but it does not really serve a purpose other than to fill up empty space in the menus.
Graphics
Very Very Valet feels like a trip down memory lane, but sadly not a really good one. We get treated to visuals that could be used for a PlayStation 2 game, rather than a quality Switch game. The overall simplistic concept art and the designs are actually quite nice, but the quality is subpar at best. The cars seem to have the best models, as they only work with flat surfaces and don’t need that many textures to look good. The main characters all look like Muppet-rejects, which is perfectly fine, but every customer looks like a cheap humanoid model from a free asset marketplace. It’s clear that the team behind this title has hardly any experience in designing a game, especially seeing you’ll have to make do with the same four characters throughout the game, only offering the possibility to swap to horrible-looking color palettes for said characters. With some (much-needed) polish, this game could be very appealing.
Sound
The sound design is okay, but also not very memorable. The music that is present does its job, as well as the game’s sound effects. Compared to many other games in the genre, this one does not have catchy music that lingers in your head for the coming days.
Gameplay
Very Very Valet is a party game that is all about you being the most perfectly chaotic valet. Customers will drive up to your place of employment, and it’s up to you to park their cars neatly on the designated parking lot, or in the bushes, or on the roof, or just leave it where it is. The fun in this game is the utter chaos that you can create when trying to reach a high score.
Each level has a different layout but sadly there are only around 20 of them, making this a game you play through during an evening gaming session with friends. The game only supports local co-op, thus making it hard to play for parts of the world that are still in lockdown due to the ongoing pandemic. That being said, the overall layout of the levels allows for a lot of creative freedom. In certain levels, it may prove interesting to actually park the cars on a nearby parking lot, while at other times, it may just be best to just pile them up near the pick-up point. Each level always starts with a few customers waiting for you to take over their car, and then they will enter the restaurant you’re working at. After a few customers have gone in, they will also start coming out again. Then it’s a matter of accepting new cars while dropping off the old ones to the leaving customers, all within a time limit. If you are not fast enough, the car of the disgruntled customer will be called to heaven itself and disappears.
As this is a party game being released during a pandemic, it’s nice to know that it’s also a fairly decent single-player experience, thanks to the options of customizing the difficulty levels. There is no proper scaling present it seems, but tinkering with the difficulty options may buy you more time or add other conveniences. Nonetheless, some other levels rely on multiplayer mechanics to be played smoothly, thus diminishing some of the game’s fun gameplay loop. Sadly, there is just not a lot of content, and this was painfully clear when reaching max rank on half of the levels of the game, we were not getting any new characters to play with. We feel as if the game is an unfinished beta, with a lot more to come, rather than a full game.
The controls of this game are hilariously bad. We feel that a lot of control mechanics were design choices, while at other times the game just does whatever the hell it wants. You have to navigate by using the left stick, and this will allow you to drive forward or backward. While those directions may be easy to pull off, steering proves to be harder, especially with some of the levels’ hazards and obstacles in place. Outside of a bit of frustration here and there, this was a fun experience.
Conclusion
Very Very Valet is a very appealing and fun concept, that lacks content, has subpar graphical quality and comes at a ridiculously high asking price. For the amount of content you’re getting, and the lack of actually unlocking anything cool throughout your escapades, we cannot really recommend this title. We did have a lot of fun playing the game, but if we had to dish out its current asking price of around 25 Euros/Dollars, we would choose other similarly priced picks that are a lot better. With a lot of polish and additional content, including new characters, this game could be amazing. For now, we’ll park our car ourselves.
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