Ah party games, it’s such a polarising genre. For every person I know who loves the chaos that comes about due to the uncaring rolls of RNGesus there’s another who’ll decry the unfairness of such a system. I’m in the former camp as I feel like it’s a great equalizer, removing a lot of the friction people have when it comes to playing games with friends. So as long as you have a group of good friends who don’t mind being enemies just for the laughs these games make for a great excuse to spend time with each other. Pummel Party was the chosen game for our fortnightly games night and whilst it won’t win any awards for innovation it certainly has the captured the essence of what a party game should be.
Made for 1 to 8 players (although why you’d play this solo is beyond me) Pummel Party pits you against your friends and a litany of challenges with a simple goal: collect a set number of crowns. To do so you’ll have to navigate the map, gather keys, and keep yourself alive so you can open one of the chests. Along the way you’ll collect other items that you can use to beat the living daylights out of your friends, including such fun weapons as a punching glove, rideable rocket and a bee hive. Death is not the end however, it’ll just return you to your closest spawn point which, depending on how the board state is, might actually turn out to be an advantage.
Between each round you’ll compete in a small mini-game, usually lasting no longer than a couple minutes, which will then award you a set number of keys and items. These games run the gamut of the usual suspects of party games including collect the most of something, be the last one standing in a variety of combat scenarios and platforming sections. These minigames are where RNGesus takes something of a back seat but given the variety of games it’s very, very unlikely that you’ll see the same person taking the podium each time. Indeed I seemed to excel at the combat focused ones but was absolutely pants at anything resembling platforming. I will admit that hurt a bit, given how many platformers I’ve reviewed here.
All of these things are great, but they’re really just the background elements to the true game: the battle between you and your friends. We started off being pretty friendly to each other, mostly just trying to figure out how to actually play the game, but it quickly deteriorated into vindictive cycles of violence against each other. Whenever someone would be in spitting distance to getting a crown inevitably everyone would start pilling on them, sending them back to the spawn point. This would then start a revenge arc where that person would go after whoever it was they felt they were most wronged by, which started everything over again.
Which honestly was a big part of the fun. I had some great moments where I was one roll away from getting a crown only to have someone steal enough keys from me that I was 1 off, preventing me from opening it. I was able to get my own back though by killing them before they could get to the chest themselves, essentially giving it to someone else. There were also the perennially unlucky folks who just couldn’t seem to catch a break no matter what they did but still ended up being competitive given they were flying under the radar of everyone else.
This speaks volumes to the overall design of the game as it ensured that everyone was effectively on a level playing field even when it looked like they weren’t. At the end I think all of us where only 1 or 2 crowns away from winning the game, meaning the usual post game “awards” section could have easily decided the winner for any of us. The person who won overall did so by 2 crowns although had they not gotten the final one it would’ve been a toss up between the rest of us.
The game could do a better job of explaining itself as there were numerous mechanics that took all of us ages to discover. Simple things like being able to view the map between rounds, what different items did, etc. weren’t introduced without explanation which left us doing things by vibes. To be fair this is kind of the vibe of party games in general, so it’s not a massive issue, but a 5 minute intro to the basics probably would go a long way.
Pummel Party does everything it needs to do to be considered a great party game. It’s approachable enough that non-gamers will still find a lot to love here whilst keeping the skill cap low enough so that the gamers among the party can’t fully dominate every challenge. The mechanics will set you and your crew up for all kinds of laughs, schemes and backstabbings, all things that make for a great party game experience. For a 7 year old game it stands up incredibly well and is definitely one I’m keeping in the back pocket for playing with my other non-gaming crews.
Rating: 8.5/10
Pummel Party is available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch right now for $21.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 2 hours playtime and 12% of the achievements unlocked.
