Muppets Party Cruise PS2 Review Houston TX

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Party games are an interesting genre on the console systems. With gaming becoming more and more popular, people looking for quick games to play with friends would be increasing in number fairly rapidly. Which is why its puzzling that party games are one of the most neglected genres and never seem to turn out well. Of course there are games like Mario Party from Nintendo, but they are the exception rather then the rule. Muppets Party Cruise is exactly that, a party game for the PS2 console which takes your favourite Muppet characters and throws them into a series of mini games to determine a winner. It's not a bad game, but its no Mario Party.

Muppet Party Cruise is split into two main game modes; long cruise and short cruise, so as you can tell right off the bat, there isn't much variety in game modes from the out set. The only difference really between the two is the short cruise allows you to select the mini games to play rather then have them randomly determined. This may sound the better game mode because you can control the length of the game and also which games to play but it has numerous restrictions. You can only play the mini games which have been unlocked and to unlock them you use coins obtained from the long cruise game mode so in reality, the game forces you into the long cruise game mode if not right away, eventually.

The long cruise game mode somewhat differs to the short cruise in that it is more fleshed out and a lot more random. After you choose the four characters to participate in the game, you have to choose a deck of the ship. There are five decks on the cruise and each deck is unlocked when three new mini games have been opened by the player. The decks are a board game littered with items and doors, with the doors leading into new mini games for players to try. The aim of the game is to earn the most cruise credits and win the most mini games to become the champion. The current game finishes after three mini games are completed.

There are some gambling elements in the game. Before each mini game you are asked to wager a number of your currently held cruise credits. The more you wager, the more you get in return if you win and this is really an essential requirement if you want to unlock the mini games which are initially locked. At the end of the game, party favours and money is delved out to the various characters. The party favours are used to reduce the price of the mini games, but not by much which almost sees them as useless. It will take quite sometime to unlock all the mini games because most of them aren't cheap to unlock.