Muppets Party Cruise Review

Muppets Party Cruise (MPC), the name pretty much says it all. You have a party game featuring the Muppets that’s set on an ocean cruise. You also get pretty much what you expect: a board game used to tie together a collection of mini-games which range from the somewhat entertaining to the inane. While the game does attempt to add a few twists to the party game standard, in the end it suffers from many of the same problems that plague the genre.

MPC tosses out the traditional game board and dice, instead going with a grid overlaid on one of the cruise ship’s five decks and a pinball style mini-game. At the beginning of your turn you must launch a pinball to determine the number of squares you’ll be able to move. The pinball game resembles the dime store style game with the cardboard backing and plastic pins more than the arcade version, so don’t expect flashing lights and bumpers here. There are numbered slots at the bottom of the board and the slot in which the ball ends up determines the number of moves you are given for the turn.

During your turn you can move to any adjacent square at each step along your move. Most of the squares are empty, but some contain bonuses or warp triggers. Bonuses take the form of cruise credits that also award you with extra moves. Your goal is to make your way to doors along the edge of the board that launch the mini-games when opened. Should you land on same square as another player you’ll compete in a quick game of rock-paper-scissors with the winner stealing some of the other player’s cruise credits. cruise credits can be used to buy extra points to be added to your score in a mini-game or to pay the entry fee to take part in some mini-games.

In addition to the players, other Muppets will make appearances from time to time on the game board. They’ll randomly wander the board for a few turns and then disappear. While a couple of them can cause a player to lose his or her turn should they cross the player’s path, most either just clear the special items from squares or end up doing nothing at all.

The pinball, rock-paper-scissors, and wandering Muppets all seem to have been added to the game in an attempt to make the board game component more interesting. Unfortunately they don’t really succeed at this and instead serve only to drag out the most boring aspect of the game. The problem is that not all that much really happens on the game board so that it feels like everyone is just killing time until someone can launch a mini-game. There are a lot of turns in which nothing happens, and the time required for everyone to shoot their pinball, plot out their move, and for their Muppet to slowly plod along to the last square can feel like an eternity. The wait can be excruciating should you be forced to miss a turn.

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.