Party Friends

Genre: Party Game / Minigame Collection

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Party Friends is a Party Game released in 2023 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, and then ported to PC in 2025. This game has players competing in 20 various minigames. That’s it, there’s no time here spent on framing devices or anything like that, just pick a generic character and head straight to the games.

This would be fine if the games were many, varied, and good. Unfortunately, even with only 20 games, there are far too many stinkers here. One extremely simple game has players chopping wood, but even that simple premise is ruined by horrible input lag. Another game has players picking up foods from a counter and delivering them to tables, but the cursor highlighting your selection is not always easy to see, and doesn’t always move how you want, making this far too confusing.

However, the absolute worst of the bunch here has to be an ice canoe minigame played co-op with one of your opponents against the other two players in a team. In this minigame, players must coordinate their paddling to steer their canoes. However, your efforts are far too slow to control the canoe, it’s far too easy to get stuck in a corner with no way out for what seems to be whole minutes at a time, and as you’re stuck and the other team moves on, the camera absolutely fails to track the players, leading to one or both canoes being off-screen or so far in the distance they can no longer be seen.

This gameplay is portrayed with simple, colorful 3D visuals that get the job done, but look amateurish and unimpressive, backed by an energetic soundtrack that fits the game’s atmosphere but does nothing to elevate things.

In the end, calling Party Friends a poor-man’s Mario Party does Mario Party a massive disservice. This game is an absolute failure with too few games, and too many games that are just plain awful, including at least one that is so bad it is outright torturous. Do not inflict this game on your friends. Or yourself, for that matter.

tl;dr – Party Friends is a Party Game with far too few minigames, and with most of those minigames being absolutely terrible, with one minigame in particular being an absolute dumpster fire of a game. Please do not mistreat your friends by making them play this.

Grade: D-

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