Yesterday evening, the author of the hit Buckshot Roulette, Mike Klubnika, teamed up with GDeavid and Oro Interactive to drop the brooding Machine Party. Think of it as a darker spin on Mario Party: up to four players, coop (e.g., local or online), and a set of mini-games that don’t shy away from being downright cruel.
On day one the Steam page already showed over 500 “very positive” reviews — 89%. Folks applaud the look and the immediate fun, yet many gripe about a thin roster of modes and dice-roll–style randomness that feels tilted.
We played two games with four players, it took 2 hours total. I want to say right away that the spirit of Mike Klubnika is preserved, the music is excellent and doesn't pound in your ears like in Buckshot Roulette.
The game itself is more about suffering than fun:
- Balance is erratic. The luck factor skews unfairly. Sure, randomness is part of the shtick, but sitting through two straight hours of it gets old fast — really grating, imo.
- Not many modes actually test skill; most rely on chance. “Most” says it: there are only a few events where aiming or reflexes matter (Duck Hunt = best, imo), the rest feels like rolling the dice.
- The level order never seems to change, and picking a weird mode doesn’t seem to alter the run… Could be a bug, a miss by the devs, or we just triggered something wrong on our end.
To sum up: this is a game for a couple of evenings at most — 15 modes loop in the same sequence, over and over. We only hit one odd bug where a spider-spinner lodged in a wall after a bad throw (didn’t ruin the vibe).
Not listing it as a flaw exactly, but scoring is opaque — i.e., first place rockets ahead even when play feels pretty even among players.
quwazero, "thumbs up" (for a free copy)
Machine Party is available only for PC (Steam) with Russian text localization.