Samba de Amigo Party Central - Review

It is funny how some games develop cult status, even if they are quite unknown by the general gaming community and that is the case of Samba de Amigo. The first game released way back in 1999 for the Dreamcast and got a port to the Wii 9 years later, but since then, the series has been dead. That made the news that Sega were reviving the series this year on Switch (and other platforms) quite a surprise, but honestly, they needed have bothered.

Booting into Samba de Amigo Party Central, one would hope that you are going to be given the chance to shake your groove thing to a number of hit songs and while technically that is an accurate description, there is more going on here. The game offers a career mode, where the titular Amigo is attempting to become an online sensation by playing popular songs to gain fans. As you progress through the stages, you earn more fans if you achieve the goals outlined at the start. Progress is tied to your fan level, so if you fail to complete an objective, you will need to revisit the stage and try again. The main reason to play this mode is to maybe play a song that you might not normally select, or to try and mix things up by ensuring that you achieve the outlined goals. Beyond that, the remaining modes are either playing solo, playing with a friend or taking your maracas online and completing to come out on top from a three song shake fest.

Shaking things is the primary way of playing the game, but there are button options for those who are not keen in moving. The game presents three different levels of circles, the top, middle and bottom of the screen, with you shaking your Joy-Con to the appropriate level. That means if the top right circle is where the on screen ball is going, you shake your right Joy-Con to the top and then if the next one is the middle left, you shake your left Joy-Con to the middle. The actual mechanic is fairly easy to learn and even if you up the difficulty of the songs, the mechanics don’t change beyond those basics. Where things get complicated, is when the game will have you shake in place for a few moments, or put two balls on screen in complete different directions. If that was not enough, there is the ability to turn on party games, which once activated will have you high five people or some other random game, all while still trying to keep your score building.

Those games though and the games posing mechanic, where you have to hold the Joy-Con in position for a few moments, impact the games ability to show you what is going on. The balls are generally a white/yellow in colour for the large ones and blue for the smaller ones. The problem is that most of the games visuals are bright white when they vanish from the screen, and then trying to see where the large balls are is quite tricky. I am someone who does not have any visual impairments, meaning no glasses and no colour blindness, but even I was struggling to keep up with the visuals that were taking place, so I would hate to see how other players with those issues would struggle. But sadly there is even more annoying aspects than just not being able to see what is going on and the main one is related to the controls.

I mentioned before that you can play the game with motion controls or with buttons and they each have their benefits and cons. Buttons are likely going to be something you want to try out earlier on, as the games motion based option doesn’t work right all the time. There were times I would follow the indicated directions and shake up or down and the game would just not understand what I was doing. There were also times when it would accept any direction as a specific input, it was so random that it often felt like I was just shaking and getting lucky that it was working out well. The game understands that its motion options are not great, because why else bother including a button option, but its there. When you select it you can use buttons or the sticks, and depending on your preference things might be ok. When using the face buttons, you use three on the right side of a controller and three directions from the d-pad, pressing the corresponding one in time with the balls. The sticks work the same way, just you flick the stick in the direction you need to go and bam, the problem is neither solution is perfect. The sticks biggest issue is when you have that wave of balls moving across the screen, you need to flick the stick in the same direction multiple times and you won’t get them all. But on the button side of things, when you have to move around in a circle or repeat a motion on screen, pressing the buttons with the right timing is a challenge.

Sadly things get even worse from there when it comes to the games music, not the selection per say, but within other areas. The original game had music that was mostly Latin inspired, which gives its instrument choice made sense, here the music leaves far away from that and more around dance hits from the radio 5 years ago. While the music selection is always going to be dependent on your own tastes, the game fails to make full use of the songs, as most of them only play for maybe 70% of the actual track. The first time I noticed it was in Good Time by Owl City, the song was getting to its good part and then just ended and at first I thought I had selected an option or the mode I was in limited things, but nope.

Visually, the game is fairly basic, there is nothing horrible going on, but there is nothing special about it either. As you complete songs or missions and level up, you will earn clothes and accessories to wear, or coins to buy items. The reason why its pointless is that you are not focusing on Amigo while you play and there isn’t any real way to interact with the character, making the whole situation weird. As I mentioned earlier, the on screen visuals are chaotic at the best of times and those with visual impairments may want to test the game out first.

I really wanted to love Samba de Amigo Party Central, music games tend to be my jam, pun intended and I really enjoyed the Wii version of the original. The problem here is that the main reason to play, shaking maracas does not work as intended and the other control inputs don’t work well enough to replace it. If you can make do with any control option, just seeing the games screen and input prompts is another layer of challenge that shouldn’t exist and when you wrap it up with songs that tend not to run their full length, it all makes you wonder why bother. If you are a die hard fan of the series, then you might enjoy it and if you can get it cheap then it would be great as a party game, but outside of those instances, there isn’t much reason to pick it up.

The Score

6.5

Review code provided by Sega

The Pros

+The games ‘career’ mode is actually fun to playthrough and with specific challenges, will test your skills

+Song selection is decent and has quite a number of songs that folks should know…

The Cons

-… though it not using more Latin based tracks feels like a major step away from the series roots

-Almost every aspect of the game feels half-baked, from the wonky controls to the crazy visuals, the end result is a mess of a game