Category: Nintendo News

Revitalizing a decades old series is never an easy task, but Spelunker Party! manages to be a decent return while adding good multiplayer functionality. Don’t let the title throw you off. It’s easy to assume this is some kind of minigame collection or something along the lines of another Mario Party. That isn’t the case. What awaits you instead is a pretty challenging and lengthy platformer that will keep players on their toes and always on the run, at least until the patterns in level design start to become a little more predictable.

While the game is based on the 1983 NES title Spelunker, this specific version is actually an updated and definitely improved re-release of Spelunker World, a title released back in 2015 for the PlayStation 4 and PC. Before it changed its name, the game was free-to-play and featured microtransactions. Those elements are gone, thankfully, and what remains is a priced title that retains 100 stages and the same gameplay. Additions like redesigned menus are included, but support for six players was dropped to four.

It can be tough to balance out the single player and multiplayer modes so that the entire game can be played in either mode. Spelunker Party! does a reasonable job at getting this done. Playing single player is fine but it is annoying that some levels will require at least one other player in order to find every collectable. Likewise, playing with others is great too, but there’s no draw to do so other than to finish the level quicker and to collect those aforementioned extras. However, it is nice that if a player gets stuck in a level the option is there to go online and work together with a second person.

That said, playing in either the offline or online multiplayer sessions is the way to go. Playing with another person will put the game into split-screen, even online. Knowing where everyone is and what they’ve collected is crucial to letting the game flow at good pace. Plus, being able to see a friend fail or take a nasty fall can’t be missed! The great thing is that you can toggle split-screen off by simply pressing into the right control stick. Being able to do this on the fly is super convenient. 

Platforming aside, Spelunker Party! doesn’t vary much when it comes to level design. After playing through the first set of levels, players should know what to expect from there on out. It’s true, later levels introduce new enemies and obstacles, but once the player figures them out it quickly loses its novelty. There isn’t much in the way of puzzles, something that could have really helped make the single player more interesting and the multiplayer more cooperative. Some levels mix things up with a boss fight, but most areas will simply have you searching for keys to get to the next section. There is a lack of depth that is apparent, especially in the first half of the game.

Spelunker Party! likes to stay a bit too close to its roots. Jumping off a vine just a tad too high will result in death. Any kind of drop will take you out instantly and even trying to jump over a dip on the path could result in your demise. You’ll find yourself kicking the bucket quite often, but a lot of that is unfortunately due to unreasonable platforming rules. For a game that is based entirely on moving from platform to platform, the player should have a clear idea of what will and won’t get them killed. 

If the goal is to fully complete the game, Spelunker Party! offers plenty to do. Outside simply completing over 100 stages, Litho-stones are collected to unlock over 200 items. These items offer extra abilities like reduction of damage from certain enemies or increased power to the air meter. Not only that, but each item can be levelled up, increasing the power of each level. There’s a lot, but once a level is fully completed there isn’t any real reason to go back and replay.

Quests help mix it up by giving you additional objectives like bombing a certain number of snakes or collecting a chunk of gold in one of the worlds; it’s odd that they don’t appear like achievements when completed. Instead, players are forced to go to the quests menu to see if it was completed, then the next quest needs to be manually selected in order for it to be worked on.

Conclusion

The Switch could always use another multiplayer game and Spelunker Party! is a good addition to the ever expanding library. It’s challenging, both in reasonable and unfair ways, and it’s length gives players a lot of levels to play through. It might not be something pulled out for newcomers and guests at a party, but it could be a good match for those looking to play together in something that lasts a little longer.

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. 

Fire Emblem Warriors has already impressed us with its mix of real-time combat and tactical planning on Switch, and given the current popularity of that console it’s easy to forget that the game has also come to the New Nintendo 3DS. While you’d be forgiven for overlooking this entry altogether, it’s important to remember that there are still many New 3DS owners in the world that haven’t upgraded to Switch yet, and Nintendo is clearly conscious of this fact. Some people have questioned the decision to pour development resources into a New 3DS port at this moment in time, but the company should be applauded for at least keeping its older console active in terms of AAA releases.

Rather than repeat everything that was said in the Switch review, we’re going to focus on what differentiates the New 3DS edition of Fire Emblem Warriors. For all intents and purposes, the core game remains intact – it has the same missions, same controls, same characters and same basic mechanics. It even has amiibo support, thanks to the refreshed feature set of the New 3DS hardware. In this respect, Fire Emblem Warriors on New 3DS is a faithful replication of the Switch version; it stands up just as well purely from a gameplay perspective. The biggest omission is the removal of the two-player co-op mode – you can’t even play together using a local wireless connection, which is a shame.

Depending on your outlook, the New 3DS version of Fire Emblem Warriors might even be considered superior to Switch in some regards. While we haven’t been able to analyse the frame rate fully, we believe it’s running at close to 60fps; everything feels smooth and lag-free, and there’s no major slowdown during busy moments. Compare this to the Switch version, which offers a 1080p / 30fps option as its default setting, and the New 3DS version ends up feeling a little smoother. The Switch edition also has a 720p / 60fps “performance” mode, but even this is subject to brief moments of slowdown which don’t appear in the New 3DS outing. 

Of course, we’re not really comparing like for like here, as the New 3DS version of Fire Emblem Warriors looks incredibly primitive when placed alongside its Switch sibling. Character models lack detail, textures are muddy and environments aren’t anywhere near as impressive. Graphical effects are toned down as well – during “Warrior” special moves the camera doesn’t zoom in like it does on the Switch version, but instead a static close-up of that character’s face is displayed – and in cutscenes the video quality is pretty terrible. Other elements – such as the dialogue screens and the map – have a horrible, compressed look to them. 

So while the action is indeed smooth and silky, the assets the game has to work with are a lot cruder than those in the gorgeous-looking Switch version. On the audio side, the voice acting has been retained and the music is more or less the same – the key difference is that the New 3DS’ speakers don’t have the same punch as those on the Switch.

Conclusion

Fire Emblem Warriors on the New 3DS is always going to remain in the shadows of its more visually impressive sibling, but if you put aside the visual trappings and focus entirely on the gameplay, there’s actually very little difference between them aside from the removal of the enjoyable co-op mode. The essence of the game is almost totally intact, and we had just as much fun playing through the quest on Nintendo’s older system as we did on the Switch. Naturally, if you’re in a position to choose between the two then Switch is the obvious choice, but should you be a New 3DS owner who hasn’t yet upgraded, you’re not really missing out – Fire Emblem Warriors is just as engaging and entertaining on Nintendo’s ageing handheld, even though you have to endure some rather weak visual assets and basic character designs.