Most of the mini-games are simple exercises in timing. Some can be entertaining, such as the game in which you must fire yourself out of a cannon at a target or push around giant beach balls with a dune buggy. Others probably seemed like good ideas on paper, but just don’t work well in the execution – the game in which you must whack tiny crabs on the head and then pick them up and carry them to open fish mouths comes to mind. The vast majority of the games though are simply not all that much fun to play and some are even solo exercises that force the other players to just sit and watch. Each mini-game is color coded into one of three categories, and you must win three mini-games in each category to win the overall game. This means that you’ll need to play a minimum of nine mini-games and have one player sweep them all to finish a game of MPC. That’s a lot of mini-games right there and you’ll usually play a lot more. Couple this with the fact that the board game portion tends to drag and you’ve got a game that can take a long time to complete. This is not an issue in games that are a lot of fun to play as the time can fly by, but in MPC you can definitely feel that it’s taking you a long time to play.

Muppet fans will find some of the wackiness they love in the game’s cutscenes, but otherwise the personalities of the Muppets are decidedly low-key. You can only choose to play as one of six Muppets and your choice will not really matter. There are some character specific sound clips played as each one moves, but some of the sayings are canned and shared between the characters. The animations look very similar between the characters as well. The developers really missed an opportunity to take advantage of the characters’ strong quirks and personalities here.

MPC links the game’s six boards with a story of the Muppet’s adventures on a party cruise. Unfortunately to maintain the story’s linearity the game requires that the board be unlocked in succession. Boards are unlocked by unlocking a required number of mini-games. Mini-games are in turn unlocked by winning credits playing the board game. This means that you will probably have to play a board a few times before being to unlock the next one. It would be one thing if there was a separate story mode for a single player game, but there is no reason that a party game should lock all of the boards and most of the mini-games from the start. If you take the time to gather a group of friends together to play a game, you should be able to play any board that you want.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 64%.  It can have its moments, but a lack of action and exciting mini-games can make Muppet Party Cruise drag on like a bad party.

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