Farsight Studios had a good run with their Pinball Arcade games. Translating the feel of a pinball machine to a console is no easy feat. Seeing Farsight tackle other “Arcade Bars” games has potential to be great. Party Arcade, developed by Planet Entertainment who brought us Game Party on the Wii, brings us the feel of a neon-lit arcade hall to the Nintendo Switch.
Collection of minigames
Party Arcade comes packed with 12 party games in total. These can all be selected from a menu but it’s more fun to go free roaming into the arcade itself. Inside you’ll find classics like Skill Ball, Air Hockey, Hoop Shot and many more. On the outside, you’ll find Cornhole and Bocce Ball. Playing each game earns you tickets you can spend on aesthetic updates to each of the games. Reaching certain scores in a game also earns you special tokens which can be used to play the slot machines to potentially earn big amounts of tickets.
Easy to learn
The controls you use are up to you. You can use the joystick and buttons to control the games, but I preferred the motion controls. These felt pretty responsive and accurate, giving a more immersive feeling. Once you find the sweet spot to be successful at a game, you can easily replicate it for mayor point gathering mayhem. The only downside is that most games are played in a similar way. Pushing a puck to the bowling pins and throwing a ball in Skill Ball, to name a few, uses the exact same motion making the games feel repetitive really quick.
Felt cheated
2019 is almost upon us and my biggest wish for the next year would be to finally get rid of micro transactions and the whole pay to play/pay to win system. Earning tickets in Party Arcade goes extremely slow, even when you are acing certain games. You could potentially not care about the new skins you could earn with these tickets, I certainly didn’t care how my ping pong ball looked like. The problem is that each game offers a “challenge” mode which needs to be unlocked by paying tickets. These challenge modes have a ridiculous high-ticket price which no-one in their right mind would go for. It would take me 150 successful games of puck bowling to reach the amount needed.
This is no doubt done on purpose because they have implemented micro transactions. Asking money for a game but hiding half of your game behind a pay wall is so not done. Could development teams finally take note that we – the consumers – are sick and tired of their patronizing ways to make us pay for something that is essentially already bought.
Multiplayer and bugs
For some reason, some games can only be played in multiplier mode. Programming an AI opponent to play ping pong or air hockey with seemed too much to ask. Maybe they’ll add these with micro transactions in the future – sigh. Currently, no opponents could be found online so these games were left untested for this review. Besides the poor choices the developers made, I got presented with many bugs during my playthroughs. At one point I even fell through the ceiling… Yep, you read that right. The arcade hall flipped, and I fell through the ceiling.
Conclusion
The good implementation of the motion controls is the sole reason I had some enjoyment out of this game. Everything else was a big letdown and I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone. It’s way too repetitive and not worth your time nor money. If there needed to be an example of shovelware on the Nintendo Switch, Party Arcade is it!
