Until playing this game, I had never heard of a Squeeball. A Squeeball is a fictional toy made on a secret island located mysteriously in the Pacific Ocean. These toys must be tested before they are released for sale, and YOU are the tester.
It sounds like this was inspired by the success of Viva Pinata, but the two games couldn’t be more different. Squeeballs Party DS is mini-game based that tasks you with bowling over, shocking, feeding, and painting with the cute little guys. That’s it, really.
There are three modes to play: Challenge Ladder, 10 Pin Bowling, and Party Game. Challenge Ladder lets you pick the mini game you want play and gives you a specific goal to achieve before you complete the challenge and unlock a new one. This is the main mode of the game. 10 Pin Bowling is a basic bowling game featuring the Squeeballs as the heads of the pins. Party Game allows up to 4 players to pass the DS around and compete in themed challenge sets. Yup, you have to pass the DS as the game does not include Wi-Fi connectivity.
As for the mini games themselves, Squeeballs Party DS has six different challenges in the DS game: 10 Pin Bowling, Paint By Squeeballs, Crazy Lanes, Feeding Frenzy, Cooking, and Shock. So if you are in Challenge Ladder mode and pick Cooking to start with, once you complete the challenge, you will be taken directly to a Shock challenge.
10 Pin Bowling has you knocking down a certain number of pins with a limited amount of throws while avoiding any obstacles. Because of the poor controls and bizarre physics, you will probably need all of the throws to complete even the first challenge. There seems to be no consistency in how the game responds to your input. You can put spin on the ball, but it is impossible to know how much spin without trial and error every time. It’s a game you simply can’t get good at, you have to be lucky.
Paint By Squeeballs has much better controls, and is one of the more fun challenges in the game. It uses inverted controls (up is down, left is right), to move a cursor on the top screen. You have to aim and shoot Squeeballs at a picture to color it in. Each Squeeball is a different color, so you have to use the correct color for the image to register a percentage. You have to color in a certain percentage of the painting in a set time to complete each challenge. Later on, the game adds to the difficulty by adding in moving water balloons that erase your work if you hit one. It’s not a bad mini game, I just have trouble believing that this is one of only six challenges in the game; it’s just too shallow.
Crazy Lanes is impossibly broken. It’s yet another bowling game that has some pretty crazy courses and tasks you with hitting a set number of stars and pins while getting to the end of the course before time runs out. Getting the ball to move is tricky enough, but once it gets started, good luck getting it to stop and turn and jump as the game requires of you. Again, this is more about luck than skill, although, once you get a feel for a course, you will start to improve. You just won’t know why you are getting better. One minute the ball responds to your input well, the next time it just rolls right off the course, and the camera cannot be controlled so you are at the mercy of the game’s auto camera to show you the action. To make things worse, you have to adjust your ball’s movement based on the camera angle. Getting through all the Crazy Lanes ladder challenges should earn you a free DS game.
Feeding Frenzy asks you to feed the El Toro Squeeball other Squeeballs. It felt a little cannibalistic, but this game is a little oddball anyway. The color of the El Toro dictates the color of Squeeball you must fire into its mouth as it charges slowly towards you. Feed each three or four times and he melts into the snow. If he reaches you, game over. The aiming is good, but where your Squeeball has to land to register success is a little wonky. Sometimes hitting him anywhere is just fine, sometimes you have to hit him right in the mouth. This doesn’t make too much of a difference until later challenges where accuracy is a factor. To make it artificially more difficult, the El Toros may change color after being fed, and they utilize some random dodging techniques.
Cooking has you feeding those insatiable El Toros yet again. I won’t go into too much detail other than saying there are much better cooking games out there. The tasks are repetitive and the controls are not very responsive.
Shock has you moving a wand that is encircling a charged electrical wire. You have to navigate it around the wire to collect sparks, or slide it to the other end of the wire. You also have to avoid magnets which pull your wand towards it. Lose too much charge in your wand and you fail the challenge. Succeed and you get to watch your Squeeball electrocuted to ash. The control works fine for the most part. It’s almost impossible to get past the magnets without touching the wire though. This is the only other mini-game worth anything in this game.
Normally, a game with such little content would take me about an hour to blow through. This took me over four hours to complete because the difficulty caused by poor controls and physics. Since this isn’t already an established toy line or franchise, I would hesitate to recommend this game to anyone. It’s too difficult for the young ones, and teenagers would rather destroy human targets than the twelve cute little Squeeballs. With only a handful of challenges, and the lack of DS Wi-Fi, this game doesn’t really feel like a party at all.
A review copy of the game was provided and did not affect the outcome of this review.
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