Pummel Party Review (Nitryle)
Pummel Party is an evolution of the Mario Party formula. Finally the turn order isn't decided right at the start but after every minigame which makes the minigames even more important. As a player you can customise a lot of the settings like which items are allowed, which minigames can be selected, which special trophies should be distributed and many more.
With this customisation, Pummel Party can be the adult version but can be family friendly as well if you turn off blood effects and maybe some minigames.
The AI can be really good in some minigames but in others they are slightly overpowered. But at least you can select the difficulty level of them as well.
By adding health to the players, it can get really intense and fun, because your friends can hurt you with their items and kill you which ends in losing a lot of your keys and respawning on some dedicated points on the map.
The maps also have a great variety with a Christmas, Halloween, pirate, desert, space and forest-temple setting. Each map has special features like a killer hunting for pray at the end of the round or changing direction if a player activates a certain type of space.
These features make the maps feel unique in their own way.
But the most important aspect of this game is the new implemented mod editor. You need to keep in mind that the editor is still in beta, so some bugs can appear in mods and not every feature mentioned above is possible right now. But I have spend a lot of time in the editor and I have to say it makes so much fun creating your own maps and minigames. The editor is also really intuitive and you don't need to learn a lot to use it efficiently. Furthermore a nice community has evolved around the editor. After just seven months, in total the workshop has already 450 minigames and 402 maps for you to explore (of course some of them are not so great, but there are many maps and minigames that have gotten a lot of effort by the creators and you can find hidden gems in the workshop) and of course some Mario Party contend has already been created.
And despite the developers being a bit quiet with the community (I hope that will change soon), I am convinced that the editor will keep the game alive for a long time. So please support mod editors that are creating great contend for all of you for free.
That was a brief list of aspects why I think that Pummel Party is the best Mario Party game out there and I would definitely recommend you buying it and enjoying the rage of your friends when you kill them with an eggplant.