Oh boy.
Disappointment.
A bullshot loaded trailer is always a hint toward disappointment. In this case, the game’s footage has been sped up for the trailers, making it look a lot more engaging than it is. And a lot more entertaining, considering most of the minigames move at a glacial pace, and there’s a horrible lack of variety considering there’s 101 of them. Really, I expect some repeats at that number, but in the unfortunately significant number I played, I found four that were enjoyable, and a ton that were poorly thought out.
Most of the action based games require supernatural reflexes and a little too much luck in having a controller in the right position to hit the A button when you’ve been bouncing it up and down already, and the puzzle based games are…well, just so damn slow they’re strongly prone to being boring. Too much down time, games run too long, the amount of loading screens is ridiculous, and there’s no sense of competition for the most part. Games run between one to four players, often one player taking a long, slow turn, and they’re as far from memorable as can be generally. The only game I remember is “Deadly Distraction”, where players have to play a Space Invaders clone and clear the board in a certain timeframe. Excepting there’s no shields, and aliens just blink to a full body length to the side at about 1 FPS.
There’s also a game called “Monster Exercise”, wherein you run from a t-rex and jump obstacles. But the obstacles appear too fast and there’s very little warning before a player sees them, particularly when running at full speed, which is needed often to stay in the lead and gain points. Players could work on this by running slower, but the camera is ahead of the players, facing back, and there’s a whole two feet visible before getting hit by an obstacle and losing points. If you’re not psychic, and not an AI, you’re hitting it.
It’s just a sadly standard example of the games. Either you need superhuman reflexes or it’s boring as hell, waiting for a cue of some sort.
Another example! Explosive Quality Assurance. Hit a bomb with a hammer until it’s ready to explode. This could be amusing, were there real feedback, instead the bomb and conveyor belt start shaking. And by shaking I mean the object looks like it’s teleporting randomly around the screen. The angle doesn’t change, the color doesn’t change, it doesn’t spark, it just starts to teleport around wider and wider, in the same effect for explosions used during the Atari 2600 days as one yellow pixelated dot flashed around a tight area. It worked well for drawing flies too! But it doesn’t work well for this.
Everything about the game feels cheap. Bad German art (Elf Bowling, Polar Bowler, Yeti Games, yeah, that generic style, big noses, small eyes), poor animation, little optimization, constant loading, and a minimum of creativity. The little bit of speech is COMPLETELY unsynced from the animation, the sounds are uninspired at best, and the games…they all feel the same, and that often translates to a range of boring to actively bad.
101 in 1 Party Megamix gets 1.5 out of 5 stars. It’s not 100% awful, but it’s very bad in most regards, and what little good there is isn’t worth fighting to get to. Once again, the genre of good party games seems to be limited to Mario Party this generation.
