Wii Party U

Genre: Party Game / Minigame Collection

Players: 1-4 Competitive Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Wii Party U, released on Wii U in 2013, is a Party Game with various minigames. This game is vaguely similar to the Mario Party series, but features a more generic presentation with a focus on the player-created Mii characters.

The gameplay here is primarily split into three different sections:

TV Party is much like traditional Mario Party, with various ways to distribute the included minigames for 1-4 players. These games are all played using the Wii remote, either turned sideways to use as a gamepad, or making use of motion controls, depending on the minigame. This mode includes 65 minigames. Mostly these are fairly standard, straightforward minigames, but they’re decent nonetheless. These games can be played with a Mario Party-style game board, or with other framing devices that give players other options to determine the criteria for winning, such as an arcade-style coin-pushing machine (well, ball-pushing machine here).

Next up, House Party gives players 8 different self-contained minigames that are a bit more involved and generally use a combination of the Wii remote and Wii U gamepad in various ways. Three of these games are for 2-4 players, with the remainder requiring 3-4. Some of these games, like the Twister-esque co-op game Button Smashers, work better than others, like the motion-sensing Water Runners, which suffers from problematic motion controls.

Finally, GamePad party is a selection of 7 2-player games that are exclusively played on the Wii U gamepad, with 14 additional smaller minigames (both competitive and co-op). These games varied in quality, and most didn’t quite live up to their concept, but one of the games, Tabletop Baseball, was genuinely fun, if a bit simple.

By now, you may be detecting the main problem I had with this collection. The included games here not only vary in quality, but vary in the number of players they support and the method in which they are played. There’s a good amount of fun to be had in this package, but it’s distributed across so many different game modes that it feels like you’ll be spending a lot of your time in menus before you can get to them, and you’ll have to rifle through multiple less-fantastic games to get to them. Of course, you could just use the game menus to jump to the specific minigames you like in each mode, but this circumvents much of this game’s content in a way that makes it feel like a slimmer experience, and doesn’t change how scattered and lacking coherency everything is.

In terms of presentation, this game lacks some of the visual flair of the Mario Party games as well, with simplistic 3D areas to go with the simplistic-looking Mii characters. This is all backed by a cheerful soundtrack that fits the game’s bright, family-friendly presentation well, but doesn’t do anything to stand out.

Don’t get me wrong, Wii Party U is a reasonably fun Party Game, and it makes some really creative use of both the Wii remote and the Wii U gamepad. Unfortunately, its good content is scattered across various modes and interspersed with less-than-thrilling content. This is a game that will probably be welcome in a party setting, but due to these elements and a lackluster presentation, I can’t see it ever being more popular than a Mario Party game.

tl;dr – Wii Party U is a Party Game and Minigame Collection with various multiplayer-focused games that make use of the Wii U gamepad and/or the Wii remotes in various ways. There’s some good, fun gameplay to be found here, but it’s scattered across multiple various game modes, with a lot of junk mixed in as well. Plus, the presentation simply can’t compete with the likes of Mario Party. It’s still a decent Party Game worth playing, but it just can’t compete with Mario’s best offerings in the genre.

Grade: B-

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