Petoons Party First released on 3rd Jun 19

Petoons Party is basically an indie take on Nintendo's popular Mario Party series. In it, you play through a board game with up to 4 local players and each player chooses a character from a handful of colourful chums. Believe it or not, it actually has a story as the evil Kitra wants to rule Kimera Island along with her noseless henchmen known as the Muhls. This story doesn't really have much plot as it's more just the simple premise of Petoons Party although there is a very enjoyable boss stage to master on each of the 3 boards.

Anyway, I absolutely love the graphics and sound. The Petoons are incredibly cute and fun to watch while the environments are colourful and full of entertaining distractions such as cute critters that you can see in the backgrounds. Meanwhile, the toe-tapping music suits the delightful atmosphere perfectly.

Before playing Petoons Party, you can choose from a few modes: Boards, Cups, and Mini-Games. The latter merely allows you to choose individual games to play with the boss stages being unlockable from the main Boards mode while Cups mode is simply a variety of preset arrays of mini-games to compete within. Obviously, Boards mode is the main event. For starters, you can choose to play on Kimera Island, Story Island, or Snowfall Island. Each board features branching paths and as you play, you try and get the most amount of points which are earned randomly and through the mini-games that occur after each turn. You can also play rock-paper-scissors whenever you land on the same space as an opponent and hopefully steal one of their points. Once a player reaches the end, you cooperate in a boss stage which is great fun. Overall, it's quite enjoyable and you can even fast-forward the more tedious aspects if you want.

Of course, the most important part of any party game is the collection of mini-games. Thankfully, they each play quite well. You'll find yourself trying not to fall off giant spinning food, balancing towers of objects, carrying items to your goal, performing in a simplistic rhythm game, kicking bombs in a clever take on Bomberman, and trying not to fall off collapsing stages while collecting coins. Plus, there are the boss stages that I previously mentioned. Unfortunately, I basically just mentioned all of the mini-games. Each board has its own theme and slight variation on these games which is cool but that doesn't change the fact that they're basically the same games.

Because there are so few mini-games, the overall gameplay gets very repetitive after only 1 or 2 matches. That being said, Petoons Party is still a fun game to play every once in a while but just don't expect to enjoy it for longer than a round or 2 at a time. Also, I want to mention how unfair certain events are. For starters, one game has you try and collect coins while not falling off. However, 1 character spawns right next to a chunk of land that usually has tons of coins appear on it so it's very easy for them to snag way more than the player who spawns on the opposite side of the stage. Finally, I wish there were more customization options such as the ability to make your own cup tournament and change the length of a board game match. That would have added a bit of replay value for sure.