While there’s no doubt that my family has enjoyed quite a number of local multiplayer games over the years, to be honest we’ve unfortunately been burned at least as many times as we’ve had fun. Whether the issues have stemmed from poor performance, lackluster controls, or simply an utter lack of originality, there’s no question that making great multiplayer games is an art, and many developers fall short of the task. What only a few titles have attempted though is to take on the Big N itself, and target the style of play inspired by the Mario Party series. Rather than keep you in suspense, the quick answer is that no, this doesn’t come anywhere near making anyone at Nintendo sweat.

The format and style of play are quite similar. You’ll pick your characters, who you can at least dress in a wide variety of silly costumes, choose from one of a few boards, and then jump in. Each player in turn will roll the dice, advancing on a pretty simplistic board with a limited number of event spaces. Then, at the end of each round, a mini game will be chosen for players to compete in. The thing is, when you simply walk through that summary, you could be fooled into thinking the undertaking of making it work may not be so tough. As this title proves out though, getting all of the details both big and small right is absolutely a substantial undertaking.

The first issue we had was simply with the mini games themselves. Most of them are lacking in originality, and many of them simply aren’t very fun. One mistake that was made that helps underline that problem is that, for the most part, they last entirely too long. The goal should be to give people just enough of a taste of fun that they want to come back for more, but since they overstay their welcome, you instead tend to linger in how shallow they are, making the prospect of returning to them unappealing. Even if you removed that issue though, there are a number of glaring bugs we ran into that made it feel like the game didn’t go through a very thorough quality control process. Both players being regularly identified as Player 1 when rolling was odd but very noticeable, but much worse we were given instructions for the wrong mini game more than once, though honestly most of the instructions were typically adequate at best, but not generally as helpful as they should be. What that leaves you with is an uninspired and somewhat buggy mess, not just coming up short of Mario Party and some other competitors, but not really even deserving a place in the same sentence.