Party Animals review

Over the years, developers have proven time and time again that ragdoll physics are a great way to make a game more comedic. I’ve spent countless hours flopping around the world of Human Fall Flat with my friends, and with the success of other multiplayer flop-em-ups it’s clearly a genre that sells well. Party Animals is the latest game hoping to steal your attention with its limp animal characters, but there’s a lot of competition out there.

The premise of Party Animals is ridiculously simple. You play as one of dozens of different goofy animal characters, and will be competing with your friends, random people, or the AI in a variety of games. The one constant among these games is how your beastly avatar controls, which is not particularly well to put it mildly.

As is so often the case in games like this, moving your walrus or English Bull Terrier around isn’t particularly easy. The precision you have when running from A-to-B is shaky at best, and when a tense moment comes along it struggles to walk the fine line between being funny and frustrating.

Because the mini games in Party Animals are all fiercely competitive, there’s a lot of punches to be thrown and kicks to be landed. There are individual buttons to punch, kick, and headbutt anyone who gets in your way, and with a few well placed shots you’ll knock out an opponent and leave them vulnerable. Actually turning fast enough to aim an offensive flurry is another thing entirely, but when you land a perfect flying kick and knock a rival duck to the ground it’s incredibly satisfying.

Each mini game in Party Animals has a different objective, but the first I decided to play were the more simple combat oriented ones. First up a selection of teams were tasked with surviving on a slowly sinking boat, which just meant madly punching each other and throwing any unconscious enemies overboard. The next game that involved throwing each other out of the windows of a bar wasn’t particularly different, and all of these different brawling scenarios suffered from the same control issues.

The better mini games involve slightly more unique objectives, like loading up a trebuchet to blow up the enemy base, or rushing to score goals by throwing a ball through a hoop. All these chaotic activities have the potential to break down into violence too, and beating up the enemy team is often an effective way to distract them while your other allies ensure your victory.

As well as using your fists and feet to knock out enemies, you can also pick up weapons scattered around the arena and use them to your advantage. Swinging around baseball bats and frying pans is pretty entertaining, as is blasting the enemy with the small plungers that a crossbow fires. The weapons are as unruly as pretty much every other aspect of the game though, as I found out during a particularly amusing moment when a boomerang came flying back at me and knocked me out cold.

It’s never particularly easy to pick up a weapon though, because the grab mechanic is just so fiddly. Sometimes your animal avatar will grab a weapon from the wrong side and will refuse to use it properly, sometimes you’ll just end up missing the weapon entirely. You sometimes have to use grabbing to climb too, which I never truly got to grips with (if you’ll pardon the pun). Holding onto a surface then mashing the jump button will cause you to climb it, but once you get to the top there seems to be a fifty fifty chance that you’ll struggle to make that last little hop over the top edge. Small steps are even harder to deal with, because without anything to grab onto you often just can’t get that leverage.

After a few hours with Party Animals (both with friends and bots) I was ready to move onto another game. If the game clicks more with you though there’s actually a lot of progression you can get stuck into, with levelling up and unlockable costumes to wear with style. Because there are so many good animal options available from the start I couldn’t see myself getting to excited about unlocking new ones, but if you want to hop onto the store and spend your hard earned coins then more power to you.

Ultimately Party Animals just isn’t enough fun to play, and nobody I was playing the game with wanted to continue the frustrating brawling. It has some funny moments though, and with the right crowd maybe you’d have a better time. I just can’t see why anyone would pick Party Animals over other similar party games, and that’s a real shame.