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START THE PARTY! SAVE THE WORLD (PS3)
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Publisher: Sony.
Developer: Supermassive Games. Released: March 2012. Genre: Party. Posted 31st August 2012. By Tom Clare © 2012 |
Start the Party! was a belated indication of Sony wanting in on the mass-market, using the PS Move as a means of broadening their userbase, having haemorrhaged a large portion of the casual market to the Wii during the latter half of the last decade. So whilst the lone arm-chair ranger will be enthralled by the way the Move can bring to life intelligent adventures such as Heavy Rain, there’s an equal if not greater number of social busybodies who’re after a quick fix of party fun, and this is where Save the World comes in.
Games can allow the player to assume different identities, different moods. You can play an involved adventure and go all Alan Bennett; cerebral, intelligent, immersed in your art. Then there are Party games, more akin to a Paris Hilton; glossy, uncomplicated, and invariably seeing you perform acts in front of a camera that you’d sooner rather forget. The second Start the Party title is a true gaming socialite; another collection of quick-fire mini-games designed to have you contorting around your living room and rediscovering your hand-eye coordination. It’s the intellectual equivalent of Nuts magazine, but whilst it lacks a necessary cohesiveness required to make it a true success, there’s fun to be had and surprisingly, it delivers some of the most accurate Move controls around.
Offering alternating rather than simultaneous multi-player, Start the Party: Save the World is a nippily paced pass-the-pad collection for up to four players. There are twenty or so games to tackle, and though none are exactly world-beaters, all tend to work nicely. Admittedly, the mix of styles is quite disparate, but there’s precious little to complain about when considering either the responsiveness or the motion mapping, both of which are, by all accounts, ideal. Supermassive Games wisely used the camera to track the Move controller on-screen, meaning that even if you’re playing on a smaller television, it works just as well because everything is proportional to the image the camera sees.
Students get some practice in for when they have to unblock a real toilet
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This guy mistakes the game for Just Dance, much to everyone's chargrin
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The
games are short, simple, and come thick and fast. Bear Bash is a personal
favourite; this one sees the Move doubling as a mallet and the player thrashing
around for an exhaustive minute fending off an invasion of little bears trying
to break your window. Another sees you scrubbing, bashing or erm, fire-extinguishing
robots; as well as a marvellously odd balance test that sees the player holding
a patient on a giant hand that, for reasons unexplained, is made to dangle out
the side of a fast moving ambulance. It’s not quite Bishi Bashi Special when it comes to eccentric genius, but it has
its mad-cap moments.
Deep Sea Peril is great, seeing you clamp hold of fish and dumping them in a boat, and this is a real success as it shows how smoothly the Move tracks speedy movements. On the flipside, there’s a few rather tepid shooting stages that miss the mark and some tricky Move-as-magnet levels that can prove more awkward than fun, though these are in the minority.
Save the World isn’t ugly as such, but its graphics and general presentation feel cheap and rather tacky. The menus and tutorial screens are the worst offenders, looking like the kind of animated cutaways they sometimes lace kids TV shows with, a sensation likely not helped by gaudy music and an American announcer who inescapably brings to mind adverts for fast-food. Still, you can add your own helium-voiced name for a bit of personalised humour, and capture your photo as a means of immortalising yourself on the high-score boards.
Deep Sea Peril is great, seeing you clamp hold of fish and dumping them in a boat, and this is a real success as it shows how smoothly the Move tracks speedy movements. On the flipside, there’s a few rather tepid shooting stages that miss the mark and some tricky Move-as-magnet levels that can prove more awkward than fun, though these are in the minority.
Save the World isn’t ugly as such, but its graphics and general presentation feel cheap and rather tacky. The menus and tutorial screens are the worst offenders, looking like the kind of animated cutaways they sometimes lace kids TV shows with, a sensation likely not helped by gaudy music and an American announcer who inescapably brings to mind adverts for fast-food. Still, you can add your own helium-voiced name for a bit of personalised humour, and capture your photo as a means of immortalising yourself on the high-score boards.
Clearly nobody knows what's happening, but it's okay if you laugh lots
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Scooping divers with a magnet is probably as tough as it comes trophy-wise
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Given
it’s a party game likely intended for drink-sodden parties, giddy hyperactivity
and short attention spans, there’s nowhere enough of a tethered structure to Save the World. Sure, it has the
obligatory sequential modes that see you rattling off a series of games one
after the other, as well as ‘survival’ and ‘quick-fire’ setups which mix challenges
at a frantic pace, but there’s little to get the competitive juices flowing,
even in the most jovial of terms. And as such, should you catch on quick, you’ll
probably get bored at a similar rate.
The single-player experience is predictably rather deadweight as, trophies notwithstanding, there’s only enough to warrant a couple of days play. As mentioned earlier, the multiplayer isn’t all it could have been, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the game make its way back onto my PS3 a few times under the radar. My girlfriend doesn’t play games, but she liked it. My mum? She hates ‘em, but that didn’t stop her dishing out the pain to those little bears. Why? It’s because Start the Party! Save the World is an inoffensive, accessible bit of fun. Easy to like but difficult to love, it’s sadly too insubstantial to be a serious recommendation, but deserves some recognition for how accurately it utilises both camera and Move controller.
The single-player experience is predictably rather deadweight as, trophies notwithstanding, there’s only enough to warrant a couple of days play. As mentioned earlier, the multiplayer isn’t all it could have been, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the game make its way back onto my PS3 a few times under the radar. My girlfriend doesn’t play games, but she liked it. My mum? She hates ‘em, but that didn’t stop her dishing out the pain to those little bears. Why? It’s because Start the Party! Save the World is an inoffensive, accessible bit of fun. Easy to like but difficult to love, it’s sadly too insubstantial to be a serious recommendation, but deserves some recognition for how accurately it utilises both camera and Move controller.
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VERDICT
Visual: 4/10
Audio: 3/10 Gameplay: 6/10 Longevity: 5/10 OVERALL: 5/10 |