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.