Hold up, Just to let you know, I've got the penguin suits but I don't have the actual surfboards yet
Hello there, my good friend, do you love cute anime characters? Do you like Mario Party? Do you want to waste 59.99 CDN plus tax on a game? If you said yes to all three of these then Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Party Dash is the game for you. I have vague knowledge on Umamusume and when I found out that a game from it for Steam was coming, I was somewhat curious. Well eventually I got the game and I got to play it finally and it’s something you can learn about all my experiences about the game here in this review and the 59.99.
Pros and Cons
Pros
Very fun gameplay with four distinct mini-games to play
Lots of decoration options for your dorm
Beautiful pixel art style
Cons
The gameplay can get very stale after sometime
Grind for unlocking characters for your custom team is very time consuming
Price is very high for the amount of content that the game has
Story
The Spring Fan Fest is on and with it comes to Slap Dash Grand Prix, where there are four main events for the four teams to compete in and that’s it, that’s the story. Now I will admit I am not an Umamusume expert in the slightest so I have no idea if there is some hidden lore I am missing but the story for this game is pretty much bare bones. There are four teams for you to play as and each one of them has their own story with seven chapters in them.
That’s not to say it’s not bad, I know this may come off as a shock but the characters are all different and they have unique personalities to each of them. Their designs also stand out and make them special, so there is that, which is nice.
Gameplay
You have four different minigames for you to play from, you have Hurtling Hurdles, Blazing Baskets, Dodgeball Demolition, and Gourmet Gauntlet. Hurtling Hurdles makes you go from point A to point B, dodging obstacles and using items or power-ups to give you the edge on the race. It’s basically Sonic R with Umamusume characters slapped on and it’s 2D (and dare I say in some aspects it’s better key word, some aspects).
Blazing Baskets is a basketball mini-game, it’s just that, a basketball game, that has more depth and character to it than any of the recent NBA games. Alright look, you can disagree with my Sonic R take but I make a point here. Whoever has the most points after three minutes or scores 300 points first, wins the match. Sometimes a special basketball will pop up and have additional effects to it or a hazard will appear on the court to hinder players.
Hurtling Hurdles and Blazing Baskets are actually my two favorite minigames to play as they are simple yet enjoyable. It show cases what the game’s charm is and I like it for that,
Dodgeball Demolition is just dodgeball, there is nothing really more to say to this one either. Each character has a health bar and if a character runs out of health they are out, you win by either having the most health out all characters present after the time limit. Where each character gets a certain amount of points. Or you win by knocking everyone out, in which case you win by being the last one standing
Although sadly this minigame has the most issues out of all of them due to the bad hit boxes, as even if you jump over the ball you can still get hit. Or the fact that you can’t defend yourself even if you have a ball with you. You can only catch them and some characters have abilities that when you hold to charge it for a more powerful throw, the ball will sometimes home in on you.
The last minigame and probably the odd one to be put on here is Gourmet Gauntlet, in this minigame, you have a team of two. One person is the server, while the other is the eater, and the server must give a bunch of food to the eater. You can chain a combo by feeding the eater food on the same color of plates. If you give them a different color of plate, the combo ends, the only way for you to switch color plates and keep the combo going. Is by feeding the eater food on a rainbow plate. Whichever team has the most points at the end of the timer, wins the game.
Each character has a special move they can use to help them gain an advantage during the competition. You can gain these moves by the charge meter filling up, which it can do after a set timer and such. Although some of these special moves are reused on some of the characters, so they are not all different.
Each character also has stats, these stats help their performance on certain minigames, with some characters they are the best choice when it comes to a certain minigame. The game will tell you this by having a golden thumbs-up mark on that character when selecting them. Which if I am being real here, this is a game I never expected to have this sort of thing but, oh well, it’s here.
However, you maybe asking me, Skyknighter, there has to be more to this game than just four minigames and cute horse girls, right? Well, there is a little more, there is a hidden fifth minigame that’s a roguelike, although I haven’t really touched it there is the dorm decoration room feature. This actually has to be my all-time favorite thing in the game, decorating your dorm room is very fun and there is lots of options to customize it. To get these things, you will need to get coins, which you get after completing the story missions the game has. You can even have your very own costume team but to get these, you need to recruit tickets, which you can get a few on completing certain story missions.
Although that being said though, this game does have some issues with it that I need to talk about. The fact that there are only four minigames and a hidden fifth one, is not really a justifiable price for 59.99. I mean that is a lot of money for a game like this and it hurts for me to say this because, this game is actually pretty fun. I know I have beaten the price for the game in this review before and such but you can’t deny that 59.99 is a lot to ask for. I thought Super Hot was bad on it’s price but this game and SPYXANYA: Operation Memories (which is priced at 66.99 and has 15 minigames) came out. Although to be fair I have not played the Spy X Family game, it’s still asking for a lot.
To grind to unlock all the Umamusume characters is also a chore to do, as grinding for the tickets can be time-consuming. Although you should be able to get your dream team because the final few missions of each team story will give you some. So you should have a full dream team complete by beating the third story in the game. You can also buy these tickets with the coins you get from the missions.
Graphics and Performance
The pixel art style is actually really good and the animations that are in the game are fantastic, the characters are all voiced with their original cast as well (which may explain the price maybe). I tested the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50, and 16 GB of RAM, the game ran very smoothly and should work on any PC.
Final Verdict
So, despite the fact that this game costs 59.99, there is an actual good product here, would I recommend it though? At full price, no I wouldn’t but on a sale, maybe but if it’s just low enough and you have food on the table for the next few weeks, then yes. However, that’s asking for a lot and you have to be a die-hard Umamusume fan. I will admit that I did get this game for free but I would definitely think twice before getting this at full price. The thing is, the game is fun and I would actually recommend this game if it was cheaper but that’s sadly not the case.
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