Family Game Night 4

This is the last title I needed to buy to for my American friend and I’m not sure if I saved the best or worst to last.

Let’s start with what I liked. Playing through the first game show. That’s it.

Family Game Night 4 is a game that consists of playing five games; Connect 4 Basketball, Yahtzee Bowling, Sorry Sliders, Bop It and Boggle. You can either compete against an AI opponent or a human player and you have to play all 5 games in a best of three scenario, with the exception of Boggle, to complete a game show.

You can also play the individual games under another menu. The individual games offer a slightly different variant to the one that’s part of the gameshow and these do have slightly more variety. But essentially that’s all there is to the game.

The controls are a bit awful though. For Sorry Sliders and the Bowling, the power meter is very fiddly. You have to slide it very carefully to avoid overshooting and it takes a lot of practice just to not get a full power shot. This is meaningless in the bowling which is a 100% game of luck but in the Sliders it becomes really frustrating when you have slide one slider for the win and overshoot and lose.

My biggest annoyance though is the voice over guy. He sounds majorly sarcastic when you win and overly condescending when you lose. And he can’t be interrupted at certain points, especially the end of the game show which is unskippable bullshit every single time you complete a game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 31 Achievements

I’ll start with the ones that aren’t part of the game show. You have to play all games outside of the game show and this will net a couple of achievements. There are also achievements for playing the special variants of the games available outside of the gameshow too.

In addition to above, the Bop It ones provide a little challenge in that the AI is so fucking stupid that you won’t be able to get the achievements for getting 30 commands in a row without some human help. Or using two controllers – which is what I did.

The rest are all obtained, one way or another, by going for the big one – playing fifty game shows. Playing this many gameshows allows all of the annoyances I’ve mentioned above to really sink in. There are many ways to make it quicker but going for this achievement further highlights problems with the interface.

Sorry Sliders has the unskippable intro which makes the game the longest part of a run. Yahtzee bowling is just pure luck so you may as well sack it off. As mentioned above, the AI is pretty stupid in most games but will sometimes pull a quick move out of nowhere in Boggle or Basketball to steal wins. This all adds to the game’s ending where the cash cards are turned into money but it’s totally random. Once, I won all the games, only for the AI to get the biggest card handed to them at the start. This meant all the cards had to be drawn which adds minutes to each game show.

Getting to the 50 games will get all bar one achievement and that’s for getting 1,500 Points in Boggle. This is a bit weird because if you get a win, it’s 25 points to win and you can get a maximum of 29 points for a win. So even if you get maximum points on every game – which is so unlikely to the point that it won’t happen – you will still need up to ten games to finish it. For me if was 8.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Family Game Night 4 is so weak and devoid of content, I can’t understand how it’s a standalone title. It hasn’t endeared me to the other games in the series and this will likely be my last venture in the genre – not including games already bought and started of course.

Talking in real terms, a game show will take you around 15 minutes to complete meaning an estimate for completion of around 12 to 14 hours. They will be some very boring and repetitive hours though.

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL

This was the next requested game of the three I didn’t own and while I think it was better than Looney Toons it’s not great by any means.

The story mainly revolves around Dexter as he travels through universes assembling a team of Cartoon Network characters to fight the ultimate evil and save all worlds. The ultimate evil is a remote control. Which I suppose can commit the ultimate evil of changing the channel away from Cartoon Network.

I must admit, there was some nostalgia here. When I was little, I used to watch Johnny Bravo, Captain Planet and Dexter’s Lab (sometimes the Powerpuff Girls) but some of these other ones I had never even heard of. Who the fuck is Chowder and why does he have to continually belch? I don’t get it. But I also didn’t get Cow and Chicken either and they didn’t make the cut, thank God.

The gameplay is like Super Smash Brothers in that you have two attacks and boss battles turn into a clusterfuck where it’s impossible to know what’s happening half the time. When you are not in a boss battle, it’s a side scrolling beat ‘em up although it’s generous to call it a beat ‘em up when there are only two moves you can do. The health system doesn’t make a lot of sense either. When I was playing on hard it looked like my player character could take up to 300% of damage? What’s the point in this? Why not just have a health bar like normal beat ‘em up games? It just adds to the obscurity of not knowing what’s going on.

The controls caused me a bit of an issue too. Apparently, the jump button, which is required for the side scrolling and is very important for staying alive during boss fights, defaults to the Y button. This game doesn’t pre-date standardised controls so why the fuck isn’t it the A button like every other game?

It’s based on Cartoon Network cartoon characters so it’s predictable as to what I’m going to say about the music and graphics. The music is repetitive and irritating. I think I may actually play Skyrim again just so I’ve got something nice to say about music. The graphics are as you would expect from a cartoon-based environment although some of the likenesses were good – Captain Planet aside.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The first thing I did before tackling this game was check for missables and difficulty specific achievements. There are no missables but there is an achievement for playing the game through on hard. This is one of the worse parts of the achievement hunt, not because it’s hard but the game is so boring, I struggled to play it for more than an hour at a time. If you do play the story through on hard, you will net 11 achievements. In reality it’s 13 achievements as you should get the score related ones from doing this.

The next thing I did was clear up all the things you need to do in story mode. There are a few speed run achievements but none of these are particularly troubling, with the exception of SECTOR V which requires you to complete one of the longer levels in under 5 minutes. Basically, this is trial and error so you have to do several runs to work out when you need to race through and when you need to be careful on the platforms.

There are also achievements for doing certain fights without dying. One of these fights is against a character called Aku and it was a total pain as it seemed like luck as to whether one of his attacks blew you off the map or not. This took me several attempts before I lucked out and finished it.

After this, its case of using battle mode to get all the other achievements by using two or three controllers and getting PTE finishes and assists with specific characters. The one exception to this is getting three knockouts at the same time with Captain Planet’s special attack but this is easily done in one of the end levels.

You also need to spend your points to unlock the stages, characters and alternate costumes, some of which you will need for the achievements in battle mode. This is a small grind but less painful that playing through story mode.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL is an easy completion but it seriously lacks in the fun department. I wouldn’t recommend playing this one either. There are much better games out there. Even Gamerscore wise, I don’t think it’s worth it.