Although we live in a digital era, board games continue to tarry on through several upgrades on iOS, as well as in DLC for the Wii Shop, Xbox Live Arcade, and Playstation Network. For the low price of $0.99 to $4.99 you can typically get a great board game or collection of board games to pass the time. Also, the digital era has motivated many developers to adapt games like Scrabble and Risk into more fast-paced mini-games that only take up a few minutes of your time. If you’ve ever been in a deadlocked game of Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit or Risk, you know what I’m talking about. Unfortunately, sometimes publishers decide to box up mini games and charge console game prices for them. Family Game Night 4: The Game Show from Hasbro and EA is one example of a console game that should have been released at a downloadable game price.
Family Game Night 4: The Game Show gives players five mini-games as well as a few variant modes to play with. These games include Sorry! Sliders, Scrabble Flash, Yahtzee Bowling, Bop It and Connect 4 Basketball. You may have seen some of these titles before on your iOS device because that’s where they belong. However, Family Game Night 4 tries to wrap them up into a game show format that fails to deliver game show fun. Each mini-game is too quick to be entertaining or competitive. What makes this game worse is that after you spend 15 minutes competing through the game show, your victory can get robbed due to the use of Monopoly crazy cash cards. These mysterious cards make the game show format an utter waste of time and horribly mar everything that is pure and good about board games.
When you start a game show, you can choose to play in either single or multiplayer mode. Be warned, there is no multiplayer mode. You would think that a game that is designed around five competitive games would have a multiplayer mode, but that is not the case. This was an issue with several of EA’s earlier iOS titles. Mr. Potato Head greets you and chooses one of the 5 activities to start the game. You can choose to play with the Kinect sensor or the control pad. The Kinect sensor inherently adds an extra layer of activity, but it really only works well for Bop It and to a lesser extent Connect 4 Basketball. The Kinect sensor tends to have difficulties with the other three games.
In Sorry! Sliders, you flick your thumbstick to push a Sorry game piece across the floor. If it lands on a 1, 3 or 5 you earn that number of points. However, if it lands on Sorry, you get zero points. The game plays like shuffleboard, except the Sorry peg can bounce off of the wall and your opponent’s Sorry peg. There are only two rounds of this game; the game feels like it is over, the moment you start playing. Sorry! Sliders is an ideal fit for iOS (you can just imagine flicking your finger across your iPhone’s screen), but within the context of this game show, it’s more or less just for show.
Scrabble Flash gives you five letters and you must make a 3 to 5 letter word every 30 seconds. You get 1 point per letter and win at 25 points. Once again, it’s a quick game. Typically, in games like this, players are given either more letters or have a chance to play another round with different letters. The gameshow format makes Scrabble Flash feel like an extremely thin waste of time. If only the developers had given gamers more letters in Scrabble Flash, then there would have been a greater sense of competition. The Yahtzee Bowling game is no different. Instead of shaking a cup of Yahtzee dice, you bowl down pins that serve as the Yahtzee dice. At least in this game, there is a touch of depth. You do get to re-bowl if you want to swap out which dice you want to keep. If you get a pair, you will probably want to discard the other three dice and bowl those over.
Connect 4 Basketball and Bop It probably offer the best real competition. You actually feel like you are playing a full game of Connect 4 or Bop It all the way through instead of just part of a game. The Connect 4 Basketball works just like the standard game, except you shoot your Connect 4 chip into the set like a basketball. Typically, it goes right where you shoot it, but it can give you the unfriendly bounce into the wrong slot. In Bop It, twisting, whacking, kicking and honking with the Kinect sensor is a lot of fun. It’s less fun to do so with your control pad. In general, Bop It needs the device to give players a feel of interaction so the Kinect is a good compromise.
Unfortunately, no matter how you perform in Family Game Night 4 everything is thrown out the window at the end of the game. Players are given Monopoly crazy cash cards at the end of every mini-game. You get these whether you win or lose so each player has an equal number of cards. At the end of the game, Mr. Potato Head puts them in a Crazy Cash reader, which spits out a random dollar amount for each card. So, even if you won all the mini-games, you can lose in the actual game show because of this terrible system. The player who won the lion’s share of mini-games lost the actual gameshow in four out of five run throughs, which trivialized the whole competitive aspect of the Game Show.
Family Game Night 4 is one of the poorest compilations of mini-games to hit console systems. This would have been better as a downloadable game or an iPad game. Unfortunately, even at the discounted price of $39.99, this game is probably not worth more than $19.99. Having said that, since you can get robbed of your victory by crazy cash, it may not even be worth that much.
