Developer: NapNok
Publisher: SIE
Platform: PS4
Review code provided
I have a lot of time for PlayLink titles, even if I still think it’s some way off having a killer app. What we’ve seen so far has been varied but largely inconsequential; fun party games that only really serve their purpose for one or two sessions before you can move onto something else. Despite offering plenty of fun, Chimparty falls into that same bracket.
The most immediate inspiration that’s obvious for Chimparty is Mario Party as it has more or less the same setup: you and a group of friends face off against each other and fall out as friends as a result of dastardly machinations from the game itself. Chimparty is even more capable of creating fallouts, though, as winning is about as much to do with luck as it with winning the variety of mini-games situated across its board. The ultra-competitive need not apply here.
If you’re familiar with how PlayLink operates, Chimparty doesn’t move away from its ingenious hook at all. You and up three friends can use your smartphones to connect to your PS4 and then control all of the action with simple inputs on your phone screen. I have previously had a lot of technical issues with making different devices play nice, but Chimparty created no issues, though that may have have something to do with me using a different console.
I asked some family and my partner to play with me, all of them fairly inexperienced with games. After some issues (my sister apparently struggles with instructions to hold a button down), we were having great fun for the first hour or two. The whimsical tone of Chimparty, a game in which you can make chimps go higher by making them fart, helps to endear it to casual players as well as the fact that it’s generally easy to play. A huge button on your smartphone (or tablet device, as my partner found out when her phone battery disappeared) governs everything, so whether it’s holding the button at the right angle or tapping it at the right moment to jump gaps, it’s all intuitive and easy to grasp.
No party game like this can last the distance unless it has the mini-games to match, and like basically all of its peers, Chimparty is a very mixed bag. Having played ten matches in total, there’s a decent amount but a lot of them are repeated with slight variants. This is a shame as it means that you may end up playing slight variants of the same mini-games over and over again. There’s a Pong-esque escapade that we ended up playing three times in a single match with tiny tweaks like added barrels only really spicing it up a little.
Some mini-games were greeted with cheers, others with groans. A fun Temple Run-inspired adventure was always welcome, but those that tasked players with working together to hit vases with balls were not. Likewise, while it was wonderful fun to launch a chimp and then fart to keep them airborne to see who could go the furthest, trying to keep an object away from other players felt utterly random and based on chance.
That’s where a lot of the (supposedly intentional) frustration with Chimparty stemmed from for me, that everything you accomplish feels completely irrelevant. You can win as many mini-games as you like, but there’s still no guarantee that the last-placed player won’t be able to cheese an ability to swap places with you because of a dice roll. Similarly, winning a mini-game doesn’t even feel important as you only move forward based on the amount of stars you earn from a game. However, when there are tiles that can move you forward four places and the fact that two players can’t occupy the same spot, you can easily find yourself being usurped despite being the “best” player. As someone who can be quite competitive, this drove me up the wall, though that’s probably the point of it.
The Chimparty experience does also get rather stale rather quickly, even with the ability to unlock pretty neat little accessories for your chimp the more you play. After a short while, my party and I felt like we’d seen all there was to do, not helped by the fact that so much of it repeats. We still wailed like banshees during the game’s ludicrous moments, such as modes that task you with playing with your competition, though the general reception was that this session would likely be our first and last as a group for the game.
Maybe that’s the whole point of Chimparty, though: a dispensable bit of fun that could serve as an alternative to a movie rental for a get together. While it’s not a fantastic or even all that good game, it’s still bound to entertain and even possibly make non-gamers more open to dipping their toe in the water.
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