Party Crashers

Genre: Racing / Party Game

Players: 1-8 Competitive (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

Party Crashers is, at least nominally, a Racing/Party Game where you’re racing vehicles on various tracks in various types of competitions. I say “nominally” because, well, this game is a horrible mess.

Okay, first let’s get the good out of the way: This game has a wonderful presentation, with neon-colored wireframe tracks and vehicles on a black background that makes it one of the most distinctive-looking racing games on the Switch. What’s more, the game actually features procedurally-generated race tracks, meaning the potential for variety here is theoretically endless. Also, there are a ton of options for different styles of play, and there are a wealth of features for those who want to customize the action.

The problem here is twofold. Firstly, by default the camera takes on a view that is possibly the worst way the game’s designers could have chosen. Rather than following directly behind your vehicle, following the course of the track, or staying fixed in an arbitrary position, the camera lazily follows behind your vehicle without having any sort of orientation that follows your car as it turns, meaning that it’s extremely difficult to gauge how to make turns in this game.

By default, all of those options I mentioned are locked away, but in the Settings menu there is a feature to unlock them (after multiple warnings about how you’re opposed to fun if you do). However, once you do, the game’s other problems present themselves.

In short, the game is a buggy mess, and I suspect it wasn’t very thoroughly playtested. I played with a Pro controller and some of the menu selection buttons are weird (you actually press the – button to begin a race), and hitting the wrong button can apparently enable the mode to split the controller in half for another player to take over. I was unable to find any way to undo this without restarting the whole game, and when accidentally hitting this command, it made navigating the menus impossible. Oh, and if you want to pause or quit during a race… nope, you can’t. And the menus that crop up in between races are just as frustrating as those before the race.

What’s worse, while there is an option to fix the camera to one spot, the one thing I thought was most necessary to save this game from the trash bin, for some reason it inexplicably just ended up giving me a blank screen with a featureless neon grid while the race was happening. Thinking that maybe this was caused by the randomly-generated track, I tried again, with the same result.

It’s sad, because this game had so much potential to truly stand out as something cool and unique, but the result is a sloppy mess that I couldn’t get away from fast enough.

tl;dr – Party Crashers is a Racing/Party Game with a great look, a ton of options, and procedurally-generated maps. It is also damn near unplayable, with a horrible camera and menus that just seem broken.

Grade: F

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