When
the Move was announced, a lot of people were concerned that the market
would be flooded with shallow games, mimicking the Wii’s huge library of
titles with no objective other than to flap your hands about the place
for a few minutes at a time. Save the World takes a few steps to make
its mini games a little more skillful, but there’s still nowhere near
enough here to warrant rushing out and handing over your hard earned
cash. It doesn’t really fare too well from the start, where you’re
greeted with a main menu that gives you the choice of Options, and Solo
or Group Play. There’s no difficulty settings or extra bonus items to
aim for, but if the games are great fun then we could look over that
happily enough.
But
jumping into the games doesn’t really help much due to just how mixed
the results are. With the general theme of Dr Terrible (steady with the
imagination…) and his cronies doing everything to get in the way of the
World and its day to day running, the mini games generally follow the
theme of saving people from nasty situations. There’s no specific order
to play them in, and each game is given a voiceover by a cheesy American
guy to explain what’s going on and how you can help, so you don’t need
to memorise how each game works. From here you’ll be drawing clouds,
controlling a helicopter, repairing robots and several other tasks using
your trusty Move controller. And while some of the mini-games are
really well made, others are just a bit random and frustrating.
A
couple of games have you using the Move as a drawing tool, by doing
such things as drawing clouds to bounce falling cavemen into caves, or
drawing huge laser circles around aliens to blow them up. These games
work very well indeed, with the accuracy of the Move helping to make it a
quite skillful set of games. Another favourite of mine was the
ambulance game, whereby you balance an injured person on a big hand
sticking out of an ambulance as it goes up and down hills and over speed
bumps. You’ll need to collect first aid kits as you go, and doing so
means you sometimes need to throw your casualty around and catch it
carefully. It’s good fun at first, but it’s not hard to get the hang of
it and once the challenge is gone, it loses its appeal.
This
is a problem with many of the games. A few are fun for a while, but the
challenge just doesn’t last. Others are just plain repetitive – having
to clean, repair and extinguish robots on a production line is
interesting until you’ve played it a couple of times, then you won’t go
back to it. A second player can make things a bit more enjoyable; using
the Sixaxis controller you can generally control something else within
the game to make life trickier for the main player, which makes flicking
fish into a boat slightly harder when player 2 is moving the boat
around the place. But this isn’t all of the multiplayer action you can
expect.
So,
it’s a party game. Many of the games aren’t great on your own, but
surely with a few friends it all picks up? Sadly that’s not really the
case. There are a couple of game modes to play with your fellow gamers –
Group Play and Quick Fire. They’re both pretty similar; Group Play just
lets you play a few games, hand the Move over to someone else and see
who gets the highest score. Quick Fire is basically the same, but you
only get a short time on each game before it quickly moves on to the
next which, for parties, is probably the best bet to stop your viewers
waiting for too long. It’s the same set of 20 games you’ve got available
in single player, and there isn’t really much of a party element other
than taking it in turns.
So
Start the Party: Save the World falls into that trap that so many have
fallen into before. It’s not really a party game, although it is a game
that kids might find entertaining for a couple of weekends. Considering
you can pick it up for a touch over £10 it might not be a terrible bet
for the kids, but it’s disappointing that Supermassive didn’t do more
here, especially considering it’s the second game in the series. Yes a
handful of mini-games are entertaining, but it’s not enough to
recommend.
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