Game Reviews

Mucho Party

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| Mucho Party
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Mucho Party
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| Mucho Party

If you don't like playing games with other people, you may as well stop reading this review now. While you can play Mucho Party on your own, most of the magic the game concocts fizzles out when you're not playing against a real person.

Mechanically the games work the same way, but when you're not battling for finger space, nudging your opponent out of the way, or cheering in their face when you cross the finish line first, everything feels a little empty.

Whack a friend at the other end of the iPad though and everything sparks into life. There's a hustle and bustle to the little games that make up Mucho Party that makes it almost irresistible.

Mix in brightly coloured graphics, a neat soundtrack, and a collection of games that bounces and crackles with new ideas and clever twists, and you're left with one of the best multiplayer experiences the App Store has to offer.

Mucho to do-o

The game is sliced up into a series of one-on-one mini-games. Each of these lasts around a minute, sometimes much less, and make the most of the touchscreen quite brilliantly.

One asks you to tap coloured bells to slice away segments of a coloured rope. But the bells swap places at random, and making a mistake loses you valuable seconds.

Another is all about steering a little car around the screen, painting the floor your colour as you go. You need to be the first to fill a certain percentage with your hue, but your opponent can paint over your markings by driving over them.

There's a fast-tapping hurdle game, a catapult encounter that sees you trying to knock over the towers of your opponent's castle, and a flicky twist on air hockey that tasks you with pushing counters through a gap while preventing the other player from doing the same.

Party planning

But it's not just the games where Mucho Party gets things right. You create your own avatar with a trio of selfies, so it's your face cheering when you win, and grimacing when you lose.

And it features adaptive difficulty too. Each new player is given a test. It's a little whack-a-mole clone where you tap at little creatures that are popping their heads through the screen.

It's a great idea because this is exactly the sort of game you're likely to throw on when you've got non-gaming friends around.

This is a package that encourages play. Quick restarts, randomly allocated games, and new modes that unlock the more you play. The turn around time is brief too, so if you've got more than a couple of friends around no one is waiting too long for a go.

Party on my pad

If you've got an iPad, then Mucho Party is a must buy. It fits the bigger screen perfectly, enticing people to crowd around and get involved even when they're not actively playing.

On the iPhone it's a bit of a tougher sell. There's still a lot of fun to be had, but the smaller screen can't quite open up the experience in the same way.

Mucho Party is a warm and welcoming collection of games that anyone can have a go at.

It's a pushing, shoving, slightly crazed bundle of new ideas and reworkings that deserves a place at your next gaming night.

Mucho Party

A cracking bundle of well put together games, Mucho Party doesn't disappoint
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.