Review: Viva Pinata Party Animals

Gameplay: 4
Sound: 5
Graphics: 7
Value: 4
Overall: 5.2

The Good:
- It’s good to be back on Piñata Island!
- Excellent use of copy/ paste

The Bad:
- The Parrot is totally annoying
- Compared to Viva Piñata this feels like a cash in

Think back to when you first played Rare’s Viva Piñata. How ever old you were at the time you probably have a tone of fun. Amongst all of the shooting and gore of late 2006, Viva Piñata provided gamers of all ages with an addictive, original game that was both intuitive and enjoyable.

Unfortunately though, after finishing the project they decided to hand over all of their code to Krome Studios, who were to create the second installment in the series. What a fucking disaster!
What with the release of the Wii, the official home of the party-game collation, you could say that the genre has been going stale for the past couple of years, which I think is an understatement. What Krome Studios decided to do with Viva Piñata was to take all of the code from Rare and copy and paste in onto a disk in a different order to make a party game that would be specifically aimed at children. For the most part, they’ve done a good job, with classics such as the one where you have to shoot stuff at targets and paint the floor, and the now compulsory press-the-buttons-in-the-right-order-to-make-the-guy-dance mini-game. However, If you’ve ever played a mini game collection before, there’s a chance that you’ll have literally seen all of the games before, so unless you’ve got a fucking huge love of Piñatas, you’re going to get bored with this one fast.

On the upside of all that though, there are quite a large amount of games to play, each of which last about a minute or so. I believe the total is around 40 so at least there’s a bit of variation in there for you. As well as that, you get to choose from a small bunch of the most famous characters from the (awesome) TV series and videogame including their female counter parts. What’s weird though, Is that even with all of this, you’re likely to get tired of the game after about an hour of so, simply because the game doesn’t let you select which of the mini-games you want to play, so when you play each of the characters you’re going to have to repeat several of the mini-games at least five or six times, meaning that it could take tens of hours before you play every single mini-game which sucks.

Thankfully, Krome have been kind enough to think of our sanity, because they’ve added some race sections that break up the slew of mini-games and add a refreshing change of pace to the game which is actually quite enjoyable. The races themselves are very much like cart racers, but without the carts. There are a bunch of themed race courses, from beautiful green forests to factories and icy villages. It’s hard to admit it, but if Krome had just put out a Viva Piñata cart racer, they’d be dragging in the Mario Cart crowd right now instead of the achievement whores (such as me) because the race segments are actually pretty awesome. The locals are gorgeous and it’s cool to see all of the other Piñata cheering by the side as you go past, there’s just something about those damn Fudgehogs…

Alongside the single player, Party Animals features a multiplayer section, where four players can play locally or online together and compete in their favorite party games. Again, this is really hindered down to the fact that you don’t get to choose which games you want to play, you’ve just got to go with it and hope for the best. That really kind of sucks because the whole idea behind party games is that they’re supposed to be for parties (I guess…) and should therefore, be extremely fun. However, where’s the fun in waiting for the game you want to play for 20 minutes?

When it comes down to it, Viva Piñata: Party Animals feels like a cheap cash-in on the previous game in the series. Yeah, it still has the cuteness of the first game, but maybe that’s where the problem lays with this game – taking a bunch of adorable characters and placing them into a cheap-ass party game is just immoral.

--Tom Rhodes, 360Stage Editor--