Multiplayer Games

Nov

2019

Super Mario Party

What 1-2-Switch Would Look Like as a Video Game

The first Mario Party created its own genre. By the release of the second, everyone wanted an invitation. The Mario fraternity saw similar success with their third outing, but by the fourth, the brothers were losing touch with the world. For the next four games, Mario Party handed out gimmicks like cheap drugs, and partygoers began experiencing hangovers. With the ninth and tenth outings, Mario Party resorted to chaining fans to a single vehicle just to get them to stay. In a desperate attempt to rebrand itself, Nintendo even repackaged Mario Party as Wii Party and Wii U Party. The handheld soirées were little more than dull tea parties.

With Super Mario Party, the series has cleaned itself up and arranged the best celebration since the original N64 renditions. A while ago, I advocated for the series’ demise, arguing Nintendo was slowly destroying the IP with all of the bad sequels. Super Mario Party has convinced me that Nintendo can make a good Mario Party game, but the series is not in the clear yet. In going back to the basics, Super Mario Party shows that minigame mania can still be a good time, but it is far from the ambitious, innovative sequel we have all wanted since the beginning.

What is it?

Super Mario Party is a board game if board games were cool and didn’t require social interaction. Four of you take turns rolling dice, moving around the board to collect coins, lose them, or trigger an event. Like Monopoly. Then, after everyone takes their turns, you all play a minigame. Whoever wins gets more coins. Kind of like Monopoly, but not. Players then must use these coins to purchase stars randomly placed on the board, each of which cost ten coins. The whole game ends after an allotted number of turns (in this case, the default is ten), and whoever grabbed the most stars wins everything. Exactly like underground cockfighting.

Super Mario Party shakes up the formula a bit by introducing character-specific dice blocks. On your turn, you can either roll a traditional six-sided die or your character’s die. For instance, Mario’s die has 1-3-3-3–5-6 on it, increasingly the likelihood you roll a three. Koopa, in comparison, has a die with 1-1-2-3-3-10, making you more likely to roll trash. Throughout a game, you can also collect other characters as allies, who not only can add one or two spaces to your roll each turn but give you access to their die.

Apart from the main party mode, you have several smaller offerings. Partner Party pits two teams of two against each other, and boards change to a grid-based layout on which you and you partner move at the same time determined by your collective rolls. River Survival is a glorified Paddle Battle minigame in which your team of four must navigate down a river, playing team-based minigames to collect more time in order to reach the end. Sound Stage offers a collection of rhythm-based minigames, and Toad’s Rec Room features throwaway games for people who have two Switches and two copies of Super Mario Party. The single-player and minigame modes—staples of the series—return as well.

What’s good?

Super Mario Party boasts a consistently strong selection of minigames. As with any entry in the series, there are some turds, but compared to the crap salad of Mario Party 10, this Switch sequel has some gourmet shit. Luck still dictates who will win occasionally but takes a backseat to skill.
Partner Party provides the innovation the series has so desperately needed. It allows for more strategy while moving at a quicker pace. You can divide and conquer across the board, having one player focus on stars while the other collects items and hits special spaces. Alternatively, you both can move together aggressively, collecting multiple stars per turn or stomping on your opponents to steal coins. Bad rolls and luck have less of an impact because one of you is bound to do better than the other. Even the minigames feel more varied because 2v2 and team minigames appear as frequently as the free-for-all batch.

What’s a double-edged sword?

The core game has been streamlined. Game boards are smaller; stars are cheaper; the maximum amount of turns is capped out at 20; and most fanfare is excised. Minigames have taken even more of the spotlight with these changes, and turns rarely drag out like they did in the older games. On the flip side, the smaller boards mean less strategy and politics among players. Although each board has its own unique gimmick, moving around them feels less dynamic. Players who enjoy the “board” more than the “game” will find Super Mario Party’s changes to the formula more disappointing.

What’s bad?

Despite its many modes, Super Mario Party lacks sufficient content. It only has four unique boards, the fewest of any console entry. River Survival has five different paths but the same ten minigames each time, so the mode grows stale after two or three attempts. Sound Stage is a nice diversion but can be finished in less than an hour. Fans thought that Nintendo would offer additional content in the future similar to Mario Tennis Aces or Arms, but now that we’re a year out without any DLC, we’re must accept what feels like “Mario Party Lite.”
Coming from the folks who made Super Kirby Slowdown and Disconsplatoon, it’s no surprise that Super Mario Party’s online mode sucks. Your options are reduced to competing against strangers or friends to see who wins the most minigames. You can’t play a full game. Multiple players can’t play on one console when playing with friends online. You can’t even choose from all of the minigames, just ten of them. Nintendo had an opportunity to truly reinvigorate the series, and they shrugged their shoulders.

What’s just Mario Party?

The single-player mode is a complete throwaway. Character-specific dice blocks are unbalanced. The computer players have four levels of stupidity rather than difficulty. Tutorials can’t be turned off. Certain animations drag on. Nintendo continues to withhold any true ability to customize your experience. Daisy still sounds like a deranged psychopath. The Mario Party series has always had weird/lazy/poor design choices, so it is as comforting as it is frustrating that Super Mario Party is no different.

What’s the verdict?

Years from now, I will remember the Switch as an age of lackluster sequels, but Super Mario Party will stand as one of the few worthy sequels. In returning to its roots, the game has cut off its unnecessary gimmicks in order to deliver a refined party experience, one of the best on the Switch. It may not be the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate of the series, but it doesn’t need to be for now. Seeing as this is Nintendo’s relaunch of the series, let’s hope the eventual Super Mario Party 2 does for Super Mario Party what Mario Party 2 did for Mario Party. Mario Party Party Mario Party Mario Mario Party.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 7.5
Time Played: Over 25 hours
Number of Players: 1-4
Games Like It on Switch: GO VACATION, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games 2020

Scoring Policy

Sep

2019

A Gummy’s Life

Turning a Sweet Tooth into a Cavity

God bless the guilty pleasure. We know it’s bad. We know it’s bad for us, and we still love it. We love it so much we can ignore our shame. So what if “Barbie Girl” by Aqua sucks? You’ll still lip-synch to it. We also know everyone steals extra samples on the sample tray. It’s a special type of sin, but God forgives us. And just think of the last time you watched the Notebook while drowning in a tub of ice cream and tears? Never? Liar.

A Gummy’s Life is my guilty pleasure. It’s beautifully mediocre, and I adore it. I grow bored after 15 minutes, but I show it to almost anyone who comes over to play video games. It unabashedly preys on the gamers who crave couch multiplayer, and its presentation waffles between half-baked and r/CrappyDesign. I don’t regret buying it, but you might. It’s disgustingly magical, like how school bathrooms always smell like urine despite how frequently they’re cleaned. And that’s my review on school bathrooms.

What is it?

Only A Gummy’s Life could get eight players in one small room, have them beat the juices out of each other, and still make it out with a T rating. Across 15 stages, your one goal is to be the last one standing. You will kick, punch, and head-butt your opponents into unconsciousness and then throw their bodies out-of-bounds before they wake up. Alternatively, you can bash them until they’re bled dry. If you don’t finish the job, the stage often will, whether it be death by zombies or centrifugal force.

Each stage acts as a round, with the last three remaining players earning points. Both Free for All and Team Death Match play out as you would expect, and a sudden death option ensures your gummies start losing juice if the contenders overstay their welcome. King of the Hill tasks you with collecting the most candy and is about as appetizing as the Fun Dip dipstick (incidentally, known as “White Hard Candy Sticks” elsewhere). Meanwhile, Hot Potato has you passing around an STD through physical contact which causes the carrier to explode, and whoever doesn’t get exploded wins.

Outside of these modes, you have a training option which puts you and three computers in a lobby to duke it out forever. Online play looks very similar because you’ll be stuck in this lobby until someone shows up. A Gummy’s Life’s online community was pretty much dead on arrival, although you may catch a random player every month or so. There is no separate single-player mode on offer, so bring your buddies or learn to love bots.

You can also infinitely dab, so there’s that.

What’s good?

Anyone can enjoy the mayhem, and inexperience and idiocy increase entertainment value. If you play with the full eight players (as you should), each round devolves into chaos. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to play. Run, button-mash, and pray, and you might just win anyway. A Gummy’s Life mixes absurdity and violent catharsis for a gratifying experience, at least initially.
The stages bring variety to how you die, adding that special zest to the gameplay that we so sorely lack in our everyday lives. One stage finds you climbing up a set of stairs while lava rises and rocks crash down upon you. Another features a honeycomb floor which drops out from under you if players occupy one spot for too long. A third lays out conveyor belts and is pretty bland, but if you die, you come back as a box, so that’s nifty. Most arenas have a unique gimmick, and learning to work with them is one of the few reasons to keep coming back to a Gummy’s Life.

As we will get to later, this stage’s gimmick is crashing.

What’s bad?

The controls are awful. At first, it’s funny how difficult it is to control your gummy, but funny turns to frustrating when you try to develop any sort of mastery. Each button has a different action based on whether you tap or hold the button, but the action can change based on how long you hold. For instance, each trigger button controls an arm. Tapping causes you to flail your arms feebly, but holding the buttons briefly allows you to charge harder punches. Hold for too long, however, and now you’re grabbing whatever is closest to you. The controls are overly complex and frequently unresponsive, and for a game this simple, they’re not worth the effort to tame.
A Gummy’s Life becomes stale as quickly as a Peep left on the counter. Interestingly, each character has different stats, and you would think this would incentivize players to master a certain gummy. However, the aforementioned control issues discourage true competitive play, and the stage hazards often place more emphasis on luck rather than skill. As for content, you can experience all that is offered in under an hour. There are unlockable characters theoretically, but I never came across one during my playtime.
The presentation is wildly inconsistent. Although the stages and characters look fine, the menus appear hastily drawn and colored with a garish palette. Poppy melodies last far less than 30 seconds but loop continually, recalling your fondest memories of “It’s a Small World,” but the sound effects squish and splort well enough. Winning results in little fanfare before your booted back to the menu. I don’t expect red carpets to be rolled out for me, but this suspiciously stained motel floor could use some sprucing up.
The game is buggy. Slowdown pops up sporadically, characters die inexplicably, and one stage (“A Frog’s Life”) will crash the entire game 90% of the time. For a game this small, a bug that big is egregious.

What’s the verdict?

You’d be forgiven for thinking a Gummy’ s Life is barely palatable, and to an extent, I want you to think this. For the large majority of gamers, this game is the equivalent of savoring used gum from under a desk (seeing how it is a poor man’s Gang Beasts, which isn’t that great either). However, if you have a good selection of victims (i.e. friends and family), the first 15 or so minutes of playing with new gamers is a blast. No one knows what they’re doing; they’re laughing up a storm; and it’s just fun. If you can space out your play sessions, a Gummy’s Life could make for a great party game.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 6
Time Played: Over 5 hours
Number of Players: 1-4
Games Like It on Switch: Human: Fall Flat, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Scoring Policy

Jun

2019

Arena of Valor

You Have Been Defeated

Just like everyone poops, everyone will die, and so it is with video games. Cart batteries short out; virtual shops shut down; and nostalgic hits become entombed in copyright claims, never to be ported to a newer console. However, with ROMs and some skillful pirating, most games can be revived in some form. When online-only games kick the bucket, they’re just dead. You’re only left with memories and probably some other games which are better anyway.

Rumors suggest that Chinese mega conglomerate, Tencent, intends to abandon Arena of Valor in the Western markets. Updates and new content will stop, and the company will allow the game’s audience to naturally shrivel up. To the mobile player base, this news strikes a painful blow. With nearly 80 characters, numerous promotions, and a competitive scene, the game seemed like a mainstay. For Switch owners, we knew the end was near when updates stopped this last February, leaving the game a store-brand imitation of its mobile cousin. Together, we cannot prevent AoV’s demise, but I can milk it for a review before we sell off its organs.

What is it?

Arena of Valor is a MOBA, which means it’s one team against another in a race to destroy the other’s base. I think. I haven’t played any others, but I am told AoV is simpler and faster compared to League of Legends. Focusing on what I do know, you and four other teammates (be it strangers or friends) choose from 52 characters, split into six class types. Assassins are skilled at killing enemies; tanks soak up damage; warriors don’t know if they want to be assassins or tanks; marksmen shoot from afar and everyone wants to be them; mages do the Harry Potter things; and supports cheer on the other players and bring orange slices for halftime. Some characters can have multiple class types, and a good team will include two warriors, a tank, a marksman, and a mage. A bad team has four marksmen who all wonder why they’re losing so quickly.

The battlefield is split into three lanes, each marked by three towers on each team’s side. It is vital for you to destroy these towers, but if you’re without minions, these structures will make short work of you. The minions are CPU-controlled fighters which spawn from your base and march toward the other side, attacking other minions or towers. You can support your minions by eliminating opponents and their henchmen, which will gain you experience and gold. Experience allows you to level up and upgrade one of your three unique abilities whereas gold buys equipment which bolster your stats. Your normal attacks can do some work, but your abilities provide most of your destructive force. However, cooldowns prevent you from spamming these attacks. If you die, you face another cooldown counter before you’re back in the fray.

Although each battle has the same playing field and set of rules, how you pursue your victory is up to you. You can try to stick with a lane, fighting off all opponents and steadily chipping away at their towers. You can roam from lane to lane, ambushing enemies while relieving your weakened comrades. You can team up with an ally whose skills complement your own. You could also spend your time killing monsters in the jungle, contributing nothing to your team while gaining experience in the hopes of one day being helpful. Hell, three of you can do that, why not?

These battles constitute your main matches which can be played casually or ranked. You also can create custom matches with your friends or hop in the lobby for AoV’s equally interesting alternative modes. No one ever joins these lobbies, so you’ll never actually play a game, but they’re there. No, I won’t explain them.

Not the worst team, but it stinks of too many marksmen. And I was disconnected this game.

What’s good?

Arena of Valor’s relatively fast pace showers you in instant gratification. Matches typically last between 15 to 25 minutes, and if that’s too long for you, you can always disconnect and abandon your team to die. Like disconnecting, each of your failures and successes feel like you’re actually turning the tide of battle. Each kill earns more experience, and each destroyed tower bolsters your team. One or two players are all you need seize victory. A single person can also lose the game if they die too much, so stay back where you belong, scrubs.
The variety of heroes and level of customization creates an individualized experience. Unless you’re Valhein, and then you’re just like everyone else. For everyone but Valhein (and maybe Butterfly and Tel’Annas), your character’s tactics will change based on how you select your equipment and arcana (which also impact stats). For instance, Kil-Groth’s default is to overwhelm opponents with his attack speed and life-steal. You can customize him as a tank instead, lowering his killing power but ensuring he will distract opponents while your teammates dispatch them. Conversely, you can rob him of all defense to transform him into a killing machine who falls to cardiac arrest when opponents so much as sneeze in his direction.
The Switch rendition of the game has its perks, including better graphics. Being able to play with a controller also offers more precision. Most of all, the community is considerably less toxic. I previously swore off the mobile version because the players were such ass orchards, and I felt myself slowly growing a part of them. With the Switch version, people don’t have time to type with a controller, so fewer mean comments are said. Even if someone does say something, you can report them. It doesn’t do anything, but it feels good.

What’s bad?

The Switch version is also much worse overall than its mobile counterpart. There are fewer heroes, play modes, UI options, promotional events, perks, and updates. The character roster has not been as finely balanced as it has been on mobile so certain heroes (like Violet) can steamroll the rest. Most importantly, the player base isn’t on consoles, and there is no cross-play. As a casual player, you’ll rarely wait longer than two minutes to find a standard match, but if you want to play alternative modes or with high-skilled players, you’re best off taking your phone to the toilet rather than your Switch.
The game reeks of free-to-play stinginess and bugs. Although Arena of Valor offers temporarily free characters week-to-week, you will only permanently unlock five to use. The rest have to be purchased, and unless you empty your wallet, it will take 20 or more hours to collect enough gold to buy a hero. As for the bugs, the game crashes roughly every 6 or so matches, forcing you to scramble to re-enter before the match begins. Arena of Valor doesn’t know how to make targeting work for warriors either, so you’ll find yourself killing the little minions while an opponent cheese grates your face. You may also find your character mindlessly wandering into chaos because you can’t cancel out of an attack.
Arena of Valor lacks creative distinction. The battlefield looks like your typical fantasy affair, and the characters could be sued for plagiarism. You have a King Arthur character named “Arthur,” a hulking demon which revels in bloodshed, a big-boobed chick with a bow, an evil jester, a big-boobed chick with a hammer, a centaur with big boobs, and several others fighter girls who put the “cleave” in “ample cleavage.” What’s worse, they all speak in meme-fueled catch phrases. Unless the internet hasn’t satiated all of your desires, Arena of Valor lacks an appealing presentation.

What’s the verdict?

Arena of Valor is a solid, free game. It also has leprosy and will dump players like rotted flesh as the year progresses, if rumors are to be believed. Both veterans and newcomers can enjoy the game, so if you’re interested, board this dying horse while you can. Otherwise, join the mobile audience where its prognosis is a little better. Just don’t blame me when the cruel player base makes you wish the game died sooner.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 8
Time Played: Over 70 hours
Number of Players: 1
Games Like It on Switch: Paladins, Nine Parchments

Score Policy

Oct

2018

Treadnauts

A Pleasant Panzer Party

Like a Swiss Army knife, the Nintendo Switch carries a couch multiplayer game to cater to just about any social situation. For large casual crowds, the Jackbox Party Packs or Super Mario Party can eliminate those long awkward periods of silence. Games like TowerFall, Puyo Puyo Tetris, and Crawl can appeal to your geeky friends on game nights. The likes of Snipperclips, Overcooked 2, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime set the mood when you and your buddies enjoy both cooperation and high blood pressure. Even when you’re desperate for anything, there’s 1-2-Switch.

Treadnauts strives to blast a niche for itself in your multiplayer library by throwing you and your compatriots into a bunch of tanks to shoot and stomp each other into smithereens. At first glance, this “competitive platform fighter” may look like a simplistic romp due to its basic premise: destroy the most tanks or survive the most rounds. Although it does boast accessibility, Treadnauts also offers surprisingly intense matches in which dexterity and acrobatics determine the true tank champions.

The developers strayed a little far from realism when designing the tanks. The war machines push forward relatively slowly on their treads but miraculously can climb walls and hang from ceilings. Holding ZL removes your traction entirely and sends you sliding across the arena. Each tank carries up to three shells which gradually refill over time, and tapping or holding X fires a straight or angled shot, respectively. The tanks can double jump, and firing mid-air sends them in the opposite direction of the shell. Using this recoil, you can reliably keep your vehicle in the air with consecutive shots.

The character select screen provides a space to practice with the controls, and once you’re ready, you and up to three humans/computers can move onto the arenas. You choose from four themed locales, each of which contains 10 unique stages (plus four unlockable ones) which cycle after each round. The variety goes a long way to keep the gameplay from going stale, and the developers fortunately added an option to mix and match stages between locales after the game’s release date.

Each round, itself, typically lasts under a minute. A single shell obliterates an opponent, and your treads can accomplish the same by crushing your enemies underneath them. In terms of defense, you’ll rarely outrun your attackers on the ground, but both your bullets and your treads (with enough momentum) can destroy enemy shots. In the air, you can be nigh untouchable with proper shot placement.

Most players will have a grasp on the basics after two or three matches. After an hour or two of playtime, you’ll be comfortable with maneuvering through the air, positioning yourself for a stomp, or countering shots at you. However, even several hours into the game, you may never feel entirely in control of your tank. Treadnauts aspires to replicate the maneuverability of the cars in Rocket League, but the controls don’t provide that precision. Aiming your tank mid-air can feel overly sensitive, resulting in misplaced jumps or shots. More frustratingly, your controls are reversed when your tank is upside-down. Your left is its right, and although this would make sense to anyone below the equator, it’s plain unintuitive for the rest of us.

As such, Treadnauts is better geared for casual competition as opposed to hardcore bloodbaths. However, you can customize your matches to play just about any way you want. Like a child with no fashion sense, you can mix and match whatever modifiers you like, such as slowing the gameplay, enhancing your tanks’ mobility, giving everyone jet packs, making everyone invisible, eliminating all in-stage items, creating teams, or replacing shells with lasers. If editing your own rules doesn’t appeal to you, Treadnauts offers preset rules like a no-frills competitive mode or “Sherman’s Chess” in which your bullets can freeze mid-air, creating a minefield out of the map.

As you play, you gain experience points, and each level up grants even more modifiers. The thrill of unlocking new content eventually turns into a chore as you realize one level equates to 6-7 multiplayer rounds. The customization options enhance the gameplay and stand out as the main highlight of Treadnauts, so it’s confusing that the developers locked much of the content behind arbitrary point values. Unlocking everything can take up to ten hours or more, and grinding levels may wear at your sanity before you reach your goal.

For those who appreciate the cold isolation of a single-player mode, Treadnauts’ Target Test tasks players with destroying a smattering of targets under a set amount of time. Across the forty stages, you’ll need to slide, fly, and shoot perfectly to nail a gold or platinum medal. These medals yield considerable XP, but the time limits demand such flawless execution that you may struggle to even rank silver. Coupled with the aforementioned control issues, achieving the coveted gold on each stage takes dedication, payloads of time, and a bottle of aspirin. Without online leaderboards, Target Test will have little appeal to many players and leave you longing for other single-player options.

On the presentation side of things, Treadnauts adopts a light-hearted, cartoony look which sports quite a bit of character, from its overly distinctive tank pilots to its celebratory champagne shots to its snarky comments between rounds. The music complements the tone well enough but is usually lost amongst the sounds of explosions, engines, and the tears of the fallen. The game runs smoothly for the most part, but four-player matches can experience occasional frame rate issues.

Conclusion

Amongst the multitude of quality multiplayer Switch games, Treadnauts offers a quirky and inventive experience best enjoyed in 4-5 round increments. Its immediate accessibility engages new players in its frenetic action, and the huge menu of modifiers creates a substantial amount of variety for dedicated gamers. Even with competent bots and Target Test, this game isn’t for those going solo, and it asks a bit much from its players to fully master the controls or unlock all the content. Despite this, Treadnauts mixes the right amounts of chaos, skill, and strategy to liven your social situations with friendly competition and celebratory shouting matches.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 7.5
Time Played: Over 5 hours
Number of Players: 1-4
Games Like It on Switch: Rocket Fist, TowerFall

Scoring Policy

A Pleasant Panzer Party

Conclusion

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