A FUN MINIGAME COLLECTION

I like the Rabbids even if their first outing was sort of a glitchy mess on Wii that had clearly been changed late in development to a minigame collection instead of a Rayman adventure where he faced off against the new hoard of rabbity things. However, Rabbids made enough splash with me and clearly the rest of the world to have Illumination rip them off with their sentient twinkies called the Minions as well as garner a fair amount of sequels and spin offs. I had sort of left minigame collections/party games on the Wii as I think most people had, but Ubisoft Chengdu Studio decided to bring the formula back and they did a pretty good job.

PLATFORMS: SWITCH, PS4, XB1, PC
MSRP: $39.99
PRICE I’D PAY: $29.99

The plot is the Rabbids go back in time with their washing machine that is also a time machine to the time of Journey to the West, which gives the whole game its theme. Every Rabbid costume you unlock, the environments, the minigames, all have an undeniable Chinese aesthetic however with it being Rabbids it of course is not accurate to the story or Chinese history, and it really feels like the devs had fun combining the two.

The minigames are nothing too deep and are fairly easy to understand. In the Switch version the game is played with a single Joy Con and before each minigame it explains in detail which way to hold it and what actions the players will be performing. My mom and I played it together and we had a good time and neither of us had any issues learning new minigames as they came up. I don’t think there’s anything I haven’t seen before in other minigame collections, but I didn’t run into any minigames I despised which is a blessing in comparison to even Mario Party which has some real stinkers.

There’s plenty of ways to play. A solo adventure mode loosely tells the story of Journey to the West by showing the heroes traveling the map, but it’s all linear and just contextualizes all the minigames. The quick play mode is there for timed games, so the players set a limit, such as they only want to play for 15 minutes, and the game chooses minigames around that and at the end whoever has collected the most books (the awards for doing well in minigames) wins. There is no online play however, which is disappointing albeit not surprising. What was surprising though was that this game did not let me play until I connected my Ubisoft account. I had to turn my wi-fi off when I first played this because I couldn’t remember my password and my mom, and I wanted to play. That’s a bit much for a party game for families.

I think the lack of a structure makes this more of a quick play experience on the go than something where people will sit down and play. I don’t dislike Party of Legends, but it’s better in short bursts which is an issue I don’t think a lot of other party games have. It did however capture that feeling of playing motion control games on the Wii quite well and with the fact that all base Switch models come with two Joy Cons, I think there’s at least some value in this if two people are traveling together and want to have some genuine laughs.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.