Squeeballs Party Review

Quality control can be a difficult task. Just ask the countless little Squeeballs that you will have to sacrifice to ensure that a quality product is shipped. In Squeeballs Party for the Nintendo Wii, you put plush little toys (the titular Squeeballs) through a series of grueling and destructive trials to make sure that they can take a pounding from the children who will eventually own them. It’s all in a day’s work, but if you’re having fun in the process, that’s alright too.

Squeeballs Party skews young, but not too young. There is quite a bit of animated violence to be found, much of it in the form of cute toy mutilation. As you test out the toys, you will slice, dice, and grate them into oblivion. You will blow them up, cook them, and hurl them at a canvas so that their bodies burst into bright colors to paint your masterpiece. All of this is done through mini-games that take all of the Wii remote’s functions into consideration. It would have been great to have Wii Motion Plus support, but to be honest I never felt like the controls were imprecise. For the most part, all of the shaking, turning, pointing, and tilting was recreated faithfully on the screen. The developers were able to make mini-games that rarely required super precise motion controls, which takes away the frustration generally associated with non Wii Motion Plus games.

The mini-games include the typical bowling game that has been included in countless other Wii games, but the developers have managed to put their own twist in various ways. One of these is to include challenges that require you to get three strikes in a row, for example, before moving on. Another variation has you controlling the ball via motion controls down a perilous lane with holes and other hazards. In the same way, many of the other mini-games will seem both familiar and different as the Squeeballs add their own flavor and humor to the proceedings. Among my favorite mini-games was one where you had to fill a blank canvas with specific colors from Squeeballs that you shot out of a slingshot, and a first-person shooter type game where you fend off an approaching army of critters.

The visuals in Squeeballs Party are about as vivid and colorful as you would expect in a mini-game compilation on Wii. One of the differentiating factors for this game is that you can tell great care was taken to create a unique world and character models, so that everything seems to mesh and you start to recognize individual characteristics for each Squeeball.The world itself is also inventive and unique, and of course consistent visually from one scene to the next. There is nothing particularly outstanding about the visuals, but they do run in progressive mode and are widescreen to boot. The sound is also well done and consistent, so that the game’s entire presentation gives off the impression that this will not be a one-of outing for the Squeeballs. It wouldn’t surprise me to see more games featuring these characters in the future, although I suppose that will depend on the type of reception they get from gamers.

As a party game, Squeeballs Party will likely not have the sort of universal appeal that, say, a Mario Party game would have. Instead, it’s clear that this fun, hectic romp is aimed mostly at young boys who get a kick at the destruction and mayhem. Still, the true test of any party game is the strenght of its mini-games, and Squeeballs Party has some genuinely fun ones. The controls are tight and intuitive, the visuals are lively, and the developers have obviously worked hard to create memorable characters and a cohesive, if surpisingly naughty, world. Putting all the toys through their paces will be an enjoyable experience for young (but not too young) Wii gamers, and provides a stiff challenge to even the most jaded Wii party gamer.