Imagine if they made Mario Party but with less unfair nonsense and LEGO bricks.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/73238/lego-party-switch-review
I begrudgingly accept Mario Party’s dominance over the board game party genre it more or less created. I accept the futility of post-game stars changing the complexion of a round by sheer happenstance. This pretext is slightly tongue-in-cheek (shout-out to the NWR Mario Party Monthly stream), but no matter where my tongue is placed, Mario Party has never really been topped in my eyes. Many have come for the throne, but no one has become the Superstar. That’s what makes LEGO Party so fascinating to me. The development chops are solid, as it is from SMG Studio, a developer best known for early Switch indie Death Squared and the well-received Overcooked-likes Moving Out 1 and 2.. SMG Studio knows how to make a good humorous multiplayer game. Mario Party is, in spirit, a good humorous multiplayer game. Combining SMG Studio with the LEGO license to make a Mario Party game is indeed a match made in brick-shaped heaven. To that end, it’s wildly successful. LEGO Party is a sharp, tightly designed party game that’s only real limitation is the fact it’s the first of its kind for LEGO.
The structure and presentation is familiar, as you venture off to different vibrant boards to race around the play space to collect gold bricks (instead of stars) and studs (instead of coins). You play mini-games every turn, but the mini-games have a more intricate role here as they also decide the next turn’s order. It makes the competition a little fiercer because a victory in a mini-game could be the difference in getting to a gold brick first.
The four different boards are all from different non-licensed LEGO sets (Pirates, Ninjago, Space, and Theme Park) and all have way more personality than I first expected. Ninjago, which my kids have gotten into because of this game, often makes light of the fact the long-running series has so much lore. The themes are all varied and the handful of spots on each board where you can choose to build one of two paths makes replays less repetitive. Every board also has a running commentary with lots of custom lines just for the theme. All of the commentary nimbly threads the needle of cute and chuckleworthy without getting too grating, even on replays.
The mini-games, 60 in total, feel at home in this Mario Party-like environment. The games hit more often than they miss. It’s got grapple hooks in mini-games. Some novel puzzles pop up, usually leveraging the LEGO brick nature of items. My major complaint is that some of the mini-games have finicky controls, like a drifting race one, and the computer players, even on the lowest difficulty, would kick the crap out of me and my family often. That’s one thing Mario Party gets right: for the nature of this type of game, the lowest difficulty should be borderline braindead. In LEGO Party, it’s always some amount of competition.
A ton of unlockable characters and accessories are tied behind playing the game and specific boards. It’s a little overwhelming but it provides an ample carrot to bounce around the game to access the different rewards. Online is available with friends only, but it’s cross-platform across Switch, Xbox, PlayStation 5, and PC. Naturally four-player local play is an option here. That’s where I have the most experience and with that, it’s excellent.
The biggest test for me with LEGO Party has been longevity and I’m writing this review after having this game in family rotation for more than a month. It’s a hit, fully supplanting Mario Party. My oldest (7 years old) has played countless rounds by himself. We’ve played tons of rounds together as a family and LEGO Party has been a consistently fun time. I still don’t really know what the plot of Ninjago is, but I’m still having a blast playing this virtual board game.
Topic: LEGO Party (Switch) Review (Read 28 times)
