Welcome to winter. The time of the year when nights draw in, weather gets worse, and… well… colour wise it all gets a bit dull outside. Bursting through the winter colours, comes Carnival Games on the Nintendo Switch. (Quick disclaimer – whilst the game was free, all the opinions are my own)
Carnival Games is mostly Nintendo through and through. If you think back to the games that made the Nintendo Wii great, the party games that got people standing up and joining in? The classics like Wii Sports and Wii Fit? Carnival Games tries to fill the void left by those games on the Nintendo Switch.
Based around the idea of an American style carnival, you’re presented with a couple of minigames based around different styled worlds, Jungle, Space, Western, and errr…. Steampunk? Some of the games work better in their themes then others. For example the scifi style race game, could only ever work in the space series of games, but “Cosmic Bowling” could have fitted in anywhere really.
With that in mind, the “Cosmic Bowling” minigame is additive mini gaming at its best. Simple, and quick. Like how its meant to be.
Thinking about the game, I do wonder if theres something about a Carnival that gets lost in translation to a English Audience? Basically the more you play, the more tickets you get – the more games you can unlock. Which, I believe is very “carnival like”, but, Yes. The more fun games are there to be unlocked. It feels that Carnival Games could have been better served by giving more up front, by giving all the games, and motion controls up front.
Perhaps make us work at the games to unlock harder levels or something, but don’t make me work at getting to the fun stuff. Please? I feel there is a massively fun game here underneath the need to unlock it all. It feels like its the sort of thing that a game update could very easily fix.
The good news is that the small one enjoyed watching me play, and cheered on my gaming efforts. Which is always nice.
Perhaps though, I’m not the suited age range for this? Perhaps if you have a couple of kids who get the carnival thing better than I do, I can imagine it being a fab purchase.