Author: sick skills

The Nintendo Switch has brought social gaming back to the couch with aplomb. With the ability to literally disconnect two controllers and hand one to a buddy, how could it not? While competitive multiplayer has been the main thrust, cooperative experiences seem to be fewer and far between. Putty Pals is your friendly reminder that playing with friends is as fun as playing against them. Rather than shoe-horn a second player into an adventure meant for one, Putty Pals is built around working your way through levels with another player.

The game has you controlling two balls of clay that must traverse a world that you can only overcome with both of them put to work. The move set is simple; you can jump, you can turn into a trampoline so your partner can jump high, and you can hold hands. The crux of Putty Pals is that you must often conquer obstacles by using each other to do so. For example, you can adhere to sticky ceilings but can’t move on unless you hold each other’s hands and alternate jumping so you can pendulum swing across. Everything from colour-specific platforms to opening gates by collecting the proper doodads is built with two players in mind.

It can’t be emphasized enough that Putty Pals should be played as a cooperative experience. You could conceivably play it as a solo experience with you using both Joy-Cons in a grip, but something is definitely lost in translation. You’ll often get frustrated with trying to maneuver your heroes by alternating tapping the shoulder buttons to jump, or save the other from peril by grasping hands – achieved by pressing the analogue sticks in. It’s very much a “pat your head and rub your tummy” scenario that just isn’t worth exploring by yourself. Grab a child, a friend or a significant other and it becomes a great game of communication, laughter and teamwork.

Putty Pal’s presentation, however, is a bit of a letdown. While colorful and filled with happiness-inducing sound effects, the worlds are bereft of the type of details and life that make other games feel like a genuine place. Sure, there are jungles and beaches and ice-covered caves, but with your gelatinous protagonists being the only things that are actually animated, it can feel a little stark and dull. Perhaps the developers felt this would distract from the action, but a few googly eyes here and there wouldn’t have hurt.

The game comes equipped with 28 standard stages, which are both lengthy by design and by the fact that there are hidden doohickeys to collect in each one. There are unlockable challenge stages that tend to focus on a smaller, more complex puzzle as well as time trials for those who want to speed run the game. While not necessarily a long experience, it does a good job of not overstaying its welcome with the type of bloat that can sometimes superficially extend the lifespan of a game.

Conclusion

Even though there are no frills, Putty Pals is an entertaining and well thought out puzzle platformer that is a perfect fit for the Nintendo Switch. The analogy of the initial teaser trailer for the Switch, showing someone handing a Joy-Con to a friend at a moment’s notice, could have very well shown gameplay from Putty Pals to drive the point home. Play it with a friend and only a friend, as solo players could become a bit frustrated from trying to move forward in a game that’s obviously built for two. Our recommendation is for the co-op experience – if you’re flying solo this may not be the game for you.

The Switch is slowly but surely becoming one of the best available entertainment systems for multiplayer fun. The eShop is positively bursting at the seams with great co-op adventures and games that focus on simple, pick-up-and-play action for multiple players to enjoy. Party Golf is one of the latest titles to jump on board, hoping to find its way into your living room and give you a good laugh in the process. Does it succeed? Let’s take a look.

The entire game focuses around one extremely simple concept and, as you might expect from the title, that is to get the ball into a hole. Despite the initial simplicity, though, Party Golf has actually been designed really well; it takes that very basic aspect of golf and evolves it into something slightly different. In normal gameplay, four players (human or AI) will all be competing to reach the hole first and scores are given at the end of each round (reflecting how quickly each player managed to get to the goal). If anyone doesn’t make it to the goal before the round ends, scores are then dished out based on how far away from the hole they finished.

Unlike real golf, though, everyone is in a mad rush to fire their ball across the screen at the same time; balls collide in the air, power-ups can enable you to mess with nearby players, and there is a general sense of madness in every round. The game is perfectly functional as a solo experience but, like most party games, it is definitely enjoyed best with friends. Having multiple players sit around the TV, yelling at each other for knocking their ball off the stage as they were about to execute a perfect hole-in-one, is perhaps the game’s most enjoyable aspect and that cannot be replicated when playing alone. There is a rather nice solo player mode available, though, which we’ll get to a little later on.

Before that, let’s take a look at the main, multiplayer experience. The game boasts of having “over 100” modes available to play and this is (sort of) correct. The default mode is where you’ll definitely want to begin; players compete through as many rounds as necessary (you win by leading the table with 500 or more points and then winning another round) and everything is left at its standard settings. These other modes are basically the same fundamental idea but with different varieties on a whole host of parameters. As an example, the second available mode (called ‘Fruit Salad’) gives a random ball shape and size to each player which changes each round. These can be hilarious too – at one point our team of four were flinging around rubber ducks, bananas, a sand-timer, and a ridiculously over-sized brick that caused issues for everyone.

Some of these modes are great fun – one example has you playing in the dark, forcing you to locate the hole by illuminating sections of the screen with your ball’s flight path; unfortunately, though, others aren’t quite as strong. One particular level (which is actually great when played by four human players) is let down in single player thanks to the AI not understanding the specific task. In ‘Checking In’, you must hit a number of checkpoints before trying to sink your ball; the AI don’t try to do this, though – instead just flinging themselves right at the goal. This means that you will win every single round (as long as you complete the task) which eliminates the fun of competition.

Perhaps the game’s crowing jewel, though, is its ‘Custom Game’ mode. Here, you can make your own game modes by changing all of the parameters however you see fit. The options are truly staggering – you can change how balls are sized and shaped, their spin and bounce capabilities, the shape of the terrain, the scoring system, where tee-offs and holes are located, whether you want to put water on the course or not, whether or not to include a voting system which will allow players to change parameters between each round, specific rules to shots, how the camera works, how the aiming works, environmental factors, and so on. If we kept going we’d need to start a new website called ‘Party Golf Life’ just to have enough room for all the information – it is a very impressive feature indeed.

The solo player mode, which we touched upon earlier, is made up of a series of trials. These trials have you trying to sink the ball over a set amount of rounds with restrictions in place such as limits to the amount of shots or time you have. They are surprisingly challenging too – often even the slightest mistake has the potential to cost you the victory. Considering the game has such a multiplayer-heavy focus (you can actually play with eight players locally if you have enough Joy-Con controllers to share), this feature has a surprising amount of content.

For some, despite the amazing generosity offered in the customisation of the game’s settings, the game will likely work best in short bursts. We’d argue that the variety of ways to play (just about) justify the game’s cost but, essentially, you would have to enjoy the core ‘party-type’ gameplay to get the most out of this title. There are also a couple of little factors such as a temperamental loading screen and framerate drops (especially when playing with eight players) which stop the game from being perfect but, ultimately, it does its job rather nicely on the whole and there is an awful lot of fun to be had in the right company.

Conclusion

To answer our initial question of whether or not Party Golf can successfully join the eShop’s masterful collection of multiplayer goodness: quite simply, yes. The amount of customisation options are mind-blowing and essentially allow you to make the game be whatever you want it to be. The asking price at launch feels just a tad steep (a bit more polish and a slightly higher level of presentation wouldn’t go amiss) but, with the right friends around you, you’ll be having so much fun laughing at each other’s mistakes that you’ll hardly care.