Go Vacation

Pros: Colorful open world environment with lots to do.
Cons: Awkward controls, a surfeit of bland mini-games.

Reviewing Go Vacation was supposed to be easy. After attending a demo of the game I wrote it off in my preview as a standard, uninspired mini-game collection. And yes, the game is, in part, a collection of poorly designed, imitative mini-games. But surprisingly, it is also a rather engaging game of exploration. The question is this: is Go Vacation a drab mini-game collection with a good framing mechanism, or a fun little game hampered by a lot of dull mini-games?

Rather than being simply a collection of mini-games chosen from a main menu, Go Vacation gives players an avatar and has them wander around resorts on an island or a mountain or in a city or in the snow. They can explore these at their leisure by foot, ATV vehicle, jet ski, horse and other forms of transportation. As you wander around you will find locals standing around who, when spoken to, will invite you to do some activity like dancing or bungee jumping. It’s an interesting way to present the mini-games.

This approach is similar to that of the open world Grand Theft Auto games. And like those games, Go Vacation is often better if you ignore the planned activities in favor of doing your own thing. This is because most of the mini-games vary from drab to downright awful.

There are a lot of mini-games which vary from jet ski racing to tennis to wind surfing to sky diving. The racing games, which include ATV vehicles, jet skis and snowmobiles are incredibly dull, except for the mildly entertaining dog sledding race). A slew of “trick” games in which you pull off stunts in an ATV or other vehicle are also quite underwhelming simplistic. Some games are completely broken, such as mini-golf, in which my swinging the Wii remote seemed only tangentially related to the swing of my avatar.

Many other games, as I suggested in my preview, are simply uninspired; plain, unimaginative takes on tennis and volleyball or rhythm games that aren’t horrible but aren’t anything you haven’t played before.

A few games are mildly entertaining, such as surfing and skateboard grinding, but there was only one mini-game I really liked, wind surfing, which is actually awesome. I haven’t played anything like it before. Requiring the Remote Plus or the MotionPlus dongle, you hold the remote in both hands rotating it slightly to catch the wind and lifting and lowering it to steer. It really feels like you are catching and using the wind, and while the learning curve was steeper than anything else I played, it was also way more fun once you got the hang of it.

I only played 38 out of the 50 mini-games, so there may be one or two more good ones, but over all, as a mini-game collection Go Vacation is a terrible failure.

Playing the mini-games is easily less engaging than just wandering around. The resorts are large and colorful, with cool features like a castle and a gigantic Christmas tree. The ski mountain has a number of different slopes, while on the beach you can go in the water, run along the beach or explore the wooded hills. If you don’t want to walk or drive you can take public transportation such as trains and tour boats, which also give you the chance to scope out areas to see what’s where.

Treasure, which consists of alternate clothes to wear, is hidden throughout the resorts, and it can be fun to figure out how to get to it, which might involve using your ATV to jump from one hill to another. At one point I found a secret underground world filled with giant, colorful mushrooms. In the city I spent a lot of time on roller skates just grinding along myriad rails, searching for secret areas (I didn’t find any, but there must be one somewhere). Besides the natives who give you mini-games, there are others who point out interesting challenges, such as leaping between two rock formations that look like snakes (part of the challenge is finding a way to enter one of the snakes).

Unfortunately, exploration is hampered by the game’s fairly awful controls. For some reason, the designers decided that steering for many vehicles should be done by holding the remote and nunchuk upright and moving them in unison. This is not how all forms of traveling are done, however, so sometimes you steer with the analog stick, and sometimes you brake with the Z button but other times with the analog stick. The controls are both awkward and inconsistent.

There are also other oddities. I was confused at first when every time I played a mini-game or changed costumes I would get a screen asking me what transportation I wanted. Generally I wanted whatever I already had, so I have no idea why I was being asked. On the other hand, there are times where I really did want to switch vehicles, and there is no simple way to do that. In some places there are cars or roller skates conveniently sitting out in the open, but other times there aren’t, and the game inexplicably doesn’t allow you to change transport from the main menu.

There were also weird bugs. Sometimes after bringing my jet ski to the shore and jumping off it, I would be magically transported back into the water.

Then there are things I simply don’t see the point of. For example, you can choose a traveling companion, either a child or a pet, but all they do is get in your way when you’re trying to get around. I could not see any benefit to having a tagalong. I also couldn’t see much point in the Villa I earned after playing a certain number of mini-games, although if you like furnishing virtual houses I suppose you’ll like this.

Verdict: Squandered Potential, But Still Some Fun

Ultimately, the problem with Go Vacation is that the designers had only half the ambition they needed. They created an interesting open world to explore, but instead of creating an adventure game like Endless Ocean: Blue World, which was certainly within reach of the game (just add a little story and winnow the mini-games down to a handful of good ones), they trapped themselves in the mini-game genre and then didn’t make very good mini-games, thus diluting the game’s good qualities with a lot of dreck.

As for the question of whether this is a good game riddled with poor mini-games or a mini-game collection with a nice frame, either answer is correct. I’m going to be nice and say it’s the first. Strip out the mini-games and you’ve still got some unfortunate controls to complain about, but you’ve also got a fun, expansive world filled with some cute challenges. It’s not great, but it sure is more than I was expecting. And that's what makes it so hard to review.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.