Wii Party Review
Wii Party is the latest in Nintendo’s Wii series, a line-up of games known for their wide appeal, helping to usher in a large portion of Nintendo’s expanded market. Perhaps that’s the best audience for Wii Party, since hardcore gamers are not likely to appreciate the unimaginative mini-games and unrewarding nature of this title.
Wii Party packs a variety of modes, but the primary ones are Party Games, where you play mini-games against other players in order to progress within the larger board game-esque setting. The first two Party Games, Board Game Island and Globe Trot, should look familiar to anyone who has played Mario Party since it operates under the same principle. Your goal is to traverse a board via dice or numbered cards in order to either get to the end of the board first or collect the most hot spot photographs. The basis is easy enough to understand and is convenient for playing in groups, but in practice it’s an incredibly random system of luck. Even winning mini-games, which are meant to give you an edge over your competition, only yields another luck-based roll of the die in the case of Board Game Island. Don’t expect skill to be much of a factor here–everyone has an equal chance of winning, which is nice in a level-playing-field sort of way, but mostly it just seems chaotic. The other Party Games are, in their own ways, even more heavily reliant on luck and can be just as annoying. With no proper sense of correlation between performance and rewards or progress, the game seems pointless.
A mini-game based off of pure 50/50 luck--more annoying than you'd think.
The other two main modes, Pair Games and House Party Games, do a little better at involving the player more directly in your progress. They are significantly less random, though luck still plays a big part. Considering the brevity and relative simplicity of these modes, though, they do not quite make up for the Party Games. At the very least, House Party Games take advantage of the Wii remote’s motion sensing technology and the speaker, providing some more unique and clever games, such as passing the controller from one player to another without jostling it too much. The novelty wears out pretty quickly though, particularly since these games, such as the hide and seek mini-game Hide ‘n’ Hunt, are basically just games you can play without a video console anyway.
There are a handful of other smaller modes, including solo mode, challenges, and the option to just play any mini-game whenever you want. Ironically, I found the solo mode to be one of the most entertaining–it cuts out the fluff of boards or globe trotting to deliver one mini-game challenge after another, which essentially cuts to the heart of the game. Challenges mode is also a particularly fun option. It gives you one game with a high score to break, but they can be surprisingly addictive.
Balance Boat mode not only challenges you to co-operative two player mini-games, but an elaborate balancing act.
Putting aside the various modes, the real core gameplay of a mini-game compilation is, well, the mini-games. Wii Party’s eighty mini-games are a bit of a mixed bag. Some can be a lot of fun–such as a co-operative game that has two people working together to get sheep across a river on a series of bridges–while some are just bland and boring. Mini-games are of course going to be short, but even so, some of these games seem almost pointless in their brevity, such as a stopwatch game. Others bring back the frustration of luck–one game is literally a fifty-fifty guessing game between two doors–which may be good when playing with inexperienced players, but in the end it drains the excitement from the game.
The controls vary rather wildly depending on the mini-game. Some make great use of the motion controls–as already said, the House Party games do a great job of using the Wii remote’s unique functions. Other mini-games, though, have some surprisingly shaky motion controls. With so many micro-games, the controls need to be tight and easy for whatever task you’re doing–unfortunately that is not always the case in Wii Party.
Colorful yet simple graphics keep your attention on the mini-games.
If you’ve played any other games in the Wii series, such as Wii Sports, you know what the graphics are like in Wii Party. Tons of Miis, lots of bright colors, and very simple, minimalistic design. It is certainly festive and can be pretty dang cute at times–the animals are particularly charming–but like the gameplay, it’s not exactly inspired design and can get pretty dull. The soundtrack is also fairly unremarkable, which leaves very little eye or ear candy here.
Games can range from anywhere between five minutes and an hour (in fact, the game even shows you an estimation of how long each game mode will last). As such, Wii Party is best experienced in short sporadic bursts. The replay value comes down to whether or not you can appreciate the randomness of the game and if you have people to play with. Though unlikely, there is the potential for a lot of replay value.
Wii Party fails to capture the elegant simplicity of other Wii series titles like Wii Sports or Wii Sports Resort. In the end, Wii Party suffers from over-simplification to the point where the gameplay doesn’t really matter anymore. It may be good for an occasional casual party game, but the random luck aspects of it make it incredibly frustrating.
Rating: 
