I am not one of these game reviewers who takes pleasure in panning games. I prefer to guide people towards the best games rather than take shots at some mediocrity. But there are games that people must be warned away from, and thus it is my duty to let you all know that Game Party 2 is one of the most worthless Wii games you can buy.
It is rather surprising that the original Game Party merited a sequel, since it was roundly condemned by the gaming press, but I suppose the game must have made enough money to make back whatever pittance was spent in developing it. I never played the first game, but from what I’ve read it sounds like the sequel; a game that was created with little thought or effort in order to cash in on the public thirst for Wii activity games in which you wave your remote around.
Game Party 2 is a collection of mini-games based on the sort of games you would play in back yards, living rooms or arcades, such as darts, horseshoes and beanbags. The controls for each game are more or less the same; you hold the A button down, swing the remote and release the A button, which hopefully throws whatever object you are holding to whatever target you’re aiming for.
There are 11 mini-games in total, many of which were in the original, which had 7 mini-games. Of these, a number are the same game in a different form; in Game Party 2, there’s little difference between playing horseshoes or lawn darts. All are sports/activity games except for a trivia game that seems out of place.
These mini-games are painfully dull. Some are more challenging than others, but the hard ones are just as dull as the easy ones. The one exception is shuffleboard, which is really pretty decent, although I was never fully confident that I had much control over the direction of the puck.
Shuffleboard is the one game in the group I could stand to play for more than five minutes. I’m not saying it was a great mini-game, I’m just saying that one eleventh of Game Party 2 is tolerable.
One reason I hate to pan games is that I feel bad for the designers, who put their sweat and blood into a game only to have it dismissed out of hand. That’s not an issue with Game Party 2: there appears to have been no sweat, blood, thought or effort put into the game. Wise gamers will put their effort into finding something better.
