Customer Reviews

Viva Piñata Party Animals

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you are familar with the Mario Party concept, you are familar with this game! If not, here you go: it is basically a set of head-to-head minigames. The concept is pretty simple. You start off with a race (there are seven different courses) and then you can play between one to three mini games (your choice) after each race. You can also choose the number of times you race, etc. There is a large number of mini games: more and more are unlocked as you play the game. Up to four people can play at a time.

As to the game, I will let my ten year old daughter take over: "This game is really fun. Because they have some funny comments and funny mini games. After each race, two pinates say funny jokes and the pinatas have funny dances and say funny things when they win. I think this game is good for kids between 6 and 13. My dad thinks it is fun too and he is forty something."

I should add that this game is entirely appropiate for any age range. If your kids like Viva Pinata, they will also like this game. Enjoy!

Great fun! But very different from the original. This is a bunch of mini competitions. The kids love playing against eachother. The graphics are good. My only complaint is there is too much talking in between the games and the pinata's don't always do what your controller is telling it to. But other than that i would reccomend it. My kids 4-10 love it!

I originally purchased this game because my fiancee loves Mario Party for the N64, and I wanted to get a game for our 360 that she would enjoy as much. After searching around for a little while, I found Viva Pinata Party Animals. I read several reviews of people comparing it to Mario Party, so I purchased it from Amazon.

After playing, I can say that the game is a nice attempt to recreate a Mario Party-like game, and while fun, it ultimately isn't as good.

For starters, the way the entire game is set up is that you do a race followed by 1-3 mini-game challenges. 3 is the highest number of mini-games you can do per race, so if you want to have a lengthy game, you're going to be doing 5-7 races just to get enough mini-games to be fun. I would have preferred the ability to play more games per race, or possibly even just make the races a mini-game themselves.

Which brings me to the races: they're fun, but pretty much pointless and easy for one player to dominate. It seems that no matter who I'm playing with, I win every single race. And yes, perhaps I'm better at it than everyone else because I'm a fairly seasoned gamer, but I think a game like this should be about equal for everyone, regardless of gaming experience. That's what makes party games fun - no one wins all the time.

One thing that I like about Mario Party that's missing from Party Animals is the game board itself. The way Party Animals is played is that you do a race followed by 1-3 mini-games, and the characters get different amounts of candy for getting 1st-4th place, and the person at the end of the game that has the most candy wins, etc. You miss the nice luck/random chance element that comes with rolling the dice and being subject to wherever you land. In that sense, Party Animals plays less like a board game with some mini-games thrown in and more like a bunch of mini-games back to back.

For example, in Mario Party, you can land on Bowser and he might either take away a star or all your coins, which can move you from first to last place. In Party Animals, once you have your candy, it can't be taken away. Once someone pulls ahead of the pack, it's pretty hard to catch them.

Speaking of the mini-games, let's talk about those now. There is a nice variety, although several of them are very similar. You have some shooting games, where you have a reticule and you aim to shoot moving targets, some games where you have to press buttons in rapid succession to match a pattern you just watched, some games that involve hitting pinata stars with bats to burst them open, games that are simply about reflexes, counting games, games where you have to fight everyone else off to collect the most candy, and several other types. Each type of game has 2-4 varieties, not all of which are very different.

Overall, I'd say that Viva Pinata Party Animals is a great start for party games on the 360, but we need to refine this formula and produce more games that are a little bit closer to the Mario Party style. Not that I simply want a Mario Party for 360 - I want something new and different. However, I think Mario Party has set a good bar for game makers to reach for when making party games.

Don't let my negative statements about this game make you think that it's not fun to play, as it still is. Notice that I did still give it 4 stars. If you enjoy party games, this is definitely worth checking out.

The first thing to note about this game is that the camera angles and controls are awful. I didn't try playing it with other people because I am lame and have no friends, but playing alone was rediculous and boring. If you are a solo gamer who is a fan of regular Viva Pinata games I still dont reccommend this. If you have a Wii get a Mario Party game if you want to play something with friends or your kids. If you need a party game for your XBOX 360 get Rockband instead.

A mini-game tournament starring the Viva Pinata characters is a cool concept. Too bad the execution failed.

1) The mini-games that you want to play cannot be played at any time. You have to be lucky that the tournament selection will pick that mini-game in some long sequence of mini-games. They focus around racing tracks too much. These are fine by themselves, but it would have been nice to have a choice of not including them. What is really needed is to customize your own tournament line-up! Even allow duplication of your favorites.

2) They should have allowed the users to pick any animal -- not just four.

3) The voice commentary is really bad. They are depressing (as if they know this game is bad) and very repetitive.

We first tried this as a Xbox demo download. I then decided we needed to buy this game, its full of mini games but they're cute. I am a 27 year old mother, and between me and my husband we have children ages 4, 8, and 12 that all like the game, and I play it too! You race at the beginning, and you start collecting points to place you, after each round. Various games to play, some you have to squash ants, some you have to eat apples as fast as you can. There are some where you count how many animals walks behind this "house" and how many come back out, and guess correctly. Almost all of the games you have to collect candy to help you to get the most points. You can select how many games you want to play in a row, I think they range like 1, 3, 5, and so on. You can play up to 4 players. Players can simply press start while someone else is already in the game, and join in the fun. I've never tried other Viva Pinata games, but after buying this we looked into the DS game and found out that one is nothing at all like this one, so that was disappointing. All in all, this is a fun game.

I have a 4 year old and 8 year old. We can no longer buy one player games as chaos over who gets to play erupts. This game is fabulous as the graphics on a HDTV are awesome, the sounds are lively and it does not cause any frustration because someone is not able to get to another higher level like some games. My kids LOVE this game. It is light-hearted and simple. It's like watching a cartoon for those who can't play when friends come over to play. While I love the mental challenge of Lego Indiana, etc. for the kids, they are laughing out loud while they play this. And that is equally fabulous.

What this game offers over the original Viva Pinata game is that it includes the actual characters from the Viva Pinata television series. You get variations on characters -- their alter egos, if you think about -- in both male and female versions, such as Fergie and Francine, as examples. The voices are a perfect match, and the pre-race and post-race commentary is exactly what you would expect from Viva Pinata.

This game, however, gets very repetitive, very quickly. After the first hour into the game, it became fairly obvious that there isn't much to the game. For the most part, you pick a "length", and that decision determines the number of races and challenges that you must complete. Once you complete a race, you complete one or more challenges, which are mini games that mostly involve button-mashing. Honestly, the "short" length is just the right length, with any other length getting extremely tedious. The game randomly picks the challenges, so you have no control over the sequence. In fact, during a medium-length game, I had to play the same challenge twice between two races. This gave me the opportunity to practice, of course, but the game should be able to track the challenges between races to avoid duplication and subsequent boredom.

From a control perspective, this game is a mixed bag. The races are easy to play, although my 7-year old daughter complained about the controls being too difficult for her. The mini-game challenges are a completely different story. Before each challenge, there is a summary screen that explains the controls and goals for the selected challenge. The game makes an effort, at times, to display on-screen control tips during the challenge (especially during any challenge that involves drinking soda and burping). But some of the "run and smash" challenges are difficult to control, and aiming in many of the shooting and smashing challenges is tough. At times, things are so frantic, you can't keep track of your own score and you don't even know if you're getting it right. Sometimes I'm surprised when I win the challenge.

What I like about this game are the achievements, which are quite creative and somewhat challenging to obtain. Although after an hour, you might unlock 20% of the achievements, there are quite a few that will require some creativity to unlock. It's not just about winning, all the time.

If it weren't for the multi-player (offline and online) aspect of this game, I probably would not recommend it. Fortunately, it has good replay value because of its multi-player modes. I would not recommend it for children younger than 9 or 10, since the controls are not always intuitive. It's a fun game with a few issues that make it less than perfect.

I bought this for our family for family game night. We all enjoy it and have fun. Our children find it very entertaining. Easy for my 5 year old. Sometimes he wins even though we're "not letting him win". It's also pretty funny. Children find it amusing to throw a dart on the donkey-like pinata's behind and several other minigames. My 2 year old loves watching as well as playing a couple of the easy games such as an apple eating game and anything that requires only pushing buttons. This game is fun for all ages!!!!

This is a good title for families who play together, or younger children with siblings. If you can get beyond the cutesy cover, the game is actually fun for all ages (I'm 32), but is perhaps a bit too simple to hold the attention of more sophisticated gamers for long.

The premise is that you control a living pinata who wants to 'entertain' at a party (why you'd want to be whacked open and broken I don't know!). In order to see which pinata gets to go, they hold races and party games to see who has the most 'candiosity'. After each event, you earn candy based on your performance, and after all the events, the winner gets sent to the party and wins the game.

First, you do a very Mario-Kart-like race, which seems to award no points, but this is the most important type of event you'll see. After each race, you play a series of short (1 minute?) challenges, and you'll earn bonus points for how well you did in the previous race. Since you get the race bonus for each mini-game, the races mean a lot more than the individual events.

Many of the events require rapid button mashing, and sadly, those tend to be the most fun ones. Others require more timing finesse and accuracy, while others involve careful positioning of your character and usually bumping other players out of the way. Those can lead to a 'pick on the winner' game, which does keep the overall score fairly close.

The game is best played with 2-4 players, the more the merrier. It's perfectly playable 1 player, but the computer competition offers very little challenge overall, and there is no difficulty adjustment. On the other hand, a few games seem to have a completely unbeatable computer but perhaps I haven't learned the secret to beating those yet. It doesn't really matter because as long as you win the races (I always do), you can come in last for most of the events and still win.

If you enjoy games like Mario Kart, Muppet Party Cruise, Shrek Swamp Party, or Fuzion Frenzy, you'll know what you're getting into here.