Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

It is hard to believe, but Viva Piñata has been out for a year now.  While many people in the press pawned the game off as a kid game, word quickly spread and there was a resurgence of interest in the title.  Eventually everyone was getting their hands dirty playing shepherd to the multicolored paper animals.  Rare had a surprise hit on their hands. 

Viva Piñata: Party Animals brings players back to picturesque Piñata Island where they will take part in a reality TV show filled to the brim with wacky challenges.  This little bit of storyline serves to set up the four player party game and gives us an excuse to play crazy multiplayer party games with our favorite characters. 

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and admit that I do watch this show on Fox every Sunday morning.  I set my TiVo to record it – I’m a Viva Piñata fan.  I don’t have any kids.  While you ponder how those things go together, let’s get into the meat and potatoes of the review.

The first Viva Piñata game was a visual treat.  The characters were bright, well animated, and surprisingly detailed for creatures made of paper.  I’m not sure if Krome Studios used assets from Rare, but any way you slice it the game looks fantastic.   The environments are brightly colored, as are the Piñatas, matching the previous game and the cartoon perfectly.   There is something missing though…

In Viva Piñata, both the game and the show, there are a metric TON of characters.  You have the main characters including Fergy Fudgehog, Paulie Pretztail, Hudson Horstachio, and Franklin Fizzlybear but there were other great characters like Ella Elephanilla, Langston Lickatoad,  Prewitt Profitamole (Oi! Oi! Oiiiiii!), and the resident con-monkey, The Bonboon, just to name a few (yea, I named those from memory).  For some odd reason, Krome decided to only include the four main characters, and then four female versions of them to round out the list.  Why can’t I play as The Bonboon?  Where are the Twingersnaps?  Why can’t I play as the best character on the island – where is my playable Les?  (He only appears during scoring to throw out the score multiplier)  The game would have a lot more appeal if you could pick from the vast pool of fantastic characters resident to Piñata Island.   Even better – let me build my own Piñata!

Another aspect of Viva Piñata that caused far too much laughter was putting funny accessories on your piñata.  Putting pirate hats on Buzzlegums?  Check.  Goofy eyepatches for my Whirlms?  Roger that.  Beekeeper hats on my Tafflies?  Absolutely.  Half of the fun was making your goofy dysfunctional carnivorous piñata family uniquely yours.  After a while, you really take it personally when the Pretztails beat up on your Quackberries.  Unfortunately Viva Piñata: Party Animals doesn’t support any of this.   The ability to customize your piñata would have gone a long way towards getting buy-in from kids on this title.

As I said earlier, the premise of Party Animals is that you are invited to Piñata Island to participate in a reality TV show.  Who better to host it than investigative reporter Pecky Pudgeon and resident DJ Pierre Parrybo?  The game sports sound effects and voice actors from the show, giving the game a bit of authenticity that it wouldn’t have had with sound-alikes. 

The music in the game is upbeat and as bright as the visuals.  The game unveils the new theme song for the show in its intro (I hate it – change it back please) and is pretty consistently high quality throughout.  It is the voice work that really steals the show though.

Given that this is a very large collection of minigames wrapped around a Kart-style racing title, you can expect that the controls will be fairly simple and varied from game to game. Sometimes you’ll be using the left thumbstick to move while tapping A to nudge the other players to pick up candy, and other times you’ll be stationary and using the thumbstick to aim at distant targets. The controls are quite simple but responsive, and even with four players on the screen you’ll be able to maneuver pretty easily.

Party Animals is clearly set up as a party game.  You can square off against three of your friends over Xbox Live or in split-screen mode, with A.I. controlled players filling in any gaps should you have less than four human players.  Selecting either a short, medium, long, or custom-length game, you’ll chose from one of the four main characters or their new female counterparts and move directly into the game. 

Each level begins with a Kart-style racing area with (poorly) hidden shortcuts and power-ups.  If any of this sounds familiar, it should – it plays almost exactly like Mario Kart.  There are themed power-ups such as a honey oil-slick, water balloons to cover your opponent’s screens, missiles to take out opponents in front of you, candy to give yourself a quick speed boost, and various other staples of this genre.  The races are a single lap, making the shortcuts very important if you are playing with human players.  At the end of the race players will get points in a leaderboard style that accumulates over the course of the chosen game length.   Given that you’ll race three times per game, the 7 tracks will become so familiar that it becomes all about the power-ups.

After you race you’ll move into one of the 40 total minigames.  Not all of them are unlocked initially – they unlock over time.   There are a handful of new game types, but many of the 40 are simply variations of the others.  All told it feels like 6 minigames with mods.   You’ll swat Piñata stars (isn’t this Piñata on Piñata violence?) for speed, shoot Professor Pester’s crew a la the old school circus shooting galleries, eat apples, drink carbonated drinks to belch-propel  your sailboat in a quick race, smash Raisants, stay in the spotlight to avoid dropping candy while your opponents try to bump you out, do a bit of button sequencing Dance Dance style, and several variations therein.  Typically they only require a single button and some quick fingers, making this pretty easy to handle for all ages.  Since the games are completely random, you don’t know what is coming up next.  Completing the minigame in any place but last brings out Les to add a few points to your overall score from the race.  You can play any of the minigames in a practice mode, but they are so simple I can’t really see the point beyond jumping directly to one of your favorites. 

One of my chief complaints with Party Animals is the A.I.  While you can play four player online matches, or four player split-screen matches, the A.I. will fill in any blank spots.  Despite the option to “keep the race close” in the options, the A.I. does a pretty poor job of doing anything but losing.  In the several hours that my wife and I played we never lost a race.  The competition seemed to be simply between her and I, eventually getting to the point where we’d team up on the weak AI and trail behind just to beat them up.

While the 40 minigames advertised really boil down to 6 with mods, Viva Piñata is fun for a short while.  Some of the minigames made me laugh out loud, while others just seemed rote and repetitive.  This game really tries to be a racer and a minigame party title, but it just doesn’t feel complete in either category. Kids over 7 will easily be bored with this title as it is, in point of fact, too easy. There is a demo on Xbox Live Marketplace to try it out for yourself, but I suspect that the one group that will flock to this game are really not who Krome invited to the party – people who want easy Achievement Points. 

Viva Piñata: Party Animals can be played over Xbox Live, enabling four players to go at it without having to put up with splitscreen.   The few games I managed to play on Live were lag free and easy to access – a true boon for kids looking for a human challenge without a great deal of trouble. 

I'm giving this section half the points as the game is simply half finished.  This doesn't feel like a $50.00 dollar game to me.

To make sure I wasn’t judging too harshly, we invited a few friends over to have their kids sit down with this title.  While they loved the look of the game along with the cutscenes and voice work, they found much of the minigames to be fun for only one or two runs.  They all loved the sailboat belch race, but universally hated the Willy Wonka-inspired hoop-floating game.  It just seemed as if developer Krome Studios took everything that was fantastic about Rare’s Viva Piñata and shaved half of the features off.  The rest of the features were dunked in water until the paper was soggy.  So much of what made the original title so fun and addicting is simply absent here.  Thanks for the demo Krome, when does the full game come out?

Gaming Trend Score

69

1. Graphics: 85
2. Audio: 85
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 55
5. Value/Replay: 50
6. OVERALL:69