Marooners (Xbox One)
Chaos is a common component in many multiplayer party games, elements like randomness and fast-paced interactivity between players allowing for drastically different play experiences even when the same designs and framework are present between each session. Marooners recognizes the appeal of such frenetic fun and chooses to complete embrace chaos as its core design principle, but in doing so, it ends up showing that too much chaos can end up hurting the party game experience instead.
Marooners positions itself as a party game where up to six players can play at a time, and thankfully, you can have a mix of human or computer controlled players to ensure a hearty group is always available for play. Marooners takes the shape of a minigame collection, but the participating players don’t have control over which games they’ll be playing and only a small amount of influence over how they’ll be presented. The way Marooners first sets the players up is to have a random batch of minigames selected for a play session, the goal being to get as much treasure across the different featured games to come out on top in the end. Completing the objective of a minigame, which is usually to be the last person standing, will reward you a nice pot of treasure, but there are smaller treasure pieces that can be picked up during the game itself, these meant to encourage a constant competitive struggle to snag what you can while still trying to complete the goal of the minigame on offer.
Unfortunately, Marooners imposes an odd rule on play by default, and that is its ill-advised move of switching out of minigames before they’ve properly wrapped up. With the chaotic minigame switching option enabled, at any moment during play you may be yanked out of a minigame and thrust into another, most of them simple enough in design or concept to immediately glean how to survive but the play sessions for the minigames often ending abruptly and starting with little time to really get into the groove of whatever new play mode has been thrust upon the group. If the minigame selection hops back to a previously played game during a session, it will pick up from exactly where it left off too, meaning you might lose as you get tossed back into a suboptimal situation, minigames like ones with falling floors hard to immediately adjust back into with the frenetic pace Marooners sometimes swaps into or out of games. Once you get to know a few games and the general quirks present across them, you can eventually acclimate to this odd concept and try to grab the treasures you need to come out on top, but Marooners further sabotages itself by sometimes pulling you into treasure trove areas during the minigame spree. Rather than having some objective or theme to the action in these areas, these are just areas with a bunch of free treasure laid out so most players can scoop up more swag than they’d get in some minigames. Games with low treasure spawn rates can end up feeling futile compared this freebie round where you just need to snatch up the goodies before other players can, and many of the hardest minigames are often the worst-paying ones outside of the 25 point treasure pot you can earn for being the last one standing. Even if other human players are eliminated, before a game ends they get to come back as a ghost that can batter other players about, and while this prevents them from technically being left out before a minigame wraps up, it also leads to them smacking surviving players around and constantly draining them of treasure with each hit, further muddying the treasure collection process as you constantly have to recover lost loot or else be completely drained of it by ghost bullies.
When it comes to minigame design, Marooners trims down its concepts into weak, bite-sized forms to fit with its ill-advised swapping mechanic. If you alter the rules so that minigames only swap once one has been completed, you can actually take the time to feel out some of the games and learn their ropes properly rather than bumbling through quickly to hope to leave a mark before you get jerked somewhere else. Unfortunately, a lot of the minigames follow very basic structures that aren’t all that enjoyable. Many will have the characters running around an area viewed from above, the player’s goal just being to outlast the other characters. You only really have your jump and a basic attack to work with, sabotaging players mostly just amounting to mild thwacks as you pass that don’t do the best job of forcing enemies into dangerous spaces. Hazards can be things like blocks dropping from above, the floor falling out beneath your feet, fire shooting in from the sides, or platforms breaking apart, but many of the games amount to just trying to bully your opponents into dropping off the stage, something that is occasionally fed with power-ups such as super speed to avoid trouble and boxing gloves that sort of hit the enemy harder but not as hard as one might expect. Bombs are a common one as well, serving as an instant kill if they detonate properly on a player, but they end up slow to activate, hard to aim, and can often lead to a self-sacrifice since many areas are too cramped to really allow the explosive to shine.
Funnily enough though, one of the minigame types is devoted almost unilaterally to the use of boxing gloves and bombs despite their mechanical flaws. In the settings you’ll find you can play a mix of the game’s two minigame types, the larger group consisting of a chaotic mix of the survival games as well as things like trying to mine through vertical rock piles, outrun a boulder, and pass off an explosive totem that also grants points while it’s held, but the arena games focus on the weak combat in small battle arenas where the bombs either have too much room to work well or too little, leading either to drawn out fights or a quick death by everyone but the randomly lucky. AI players can often eliminate themselves in an explosive start in a stage or just kill themselves when a weird idiocy overtakes them and they dive off to their doom, but the arenas don’t really seem fit for six players or two, games slowing down to a crawl with less players as you wait for power-up luck to prevail but leading to rampant eliminations that can’t be accounted for when the arena is packed.
If there is one thing Marooners does at least do well, it’s provide unlockables at a pretty steady clip. Across a few rounds of Marooners you’ll pretty quickly earn the extra characters and items, and for the most part, Marooners does adhere to the idea that these characters could at least conceivably be marooned. Some obvious choices are given early such as a pirate and a diver, and even when you start to get characters like the viking and Inuit girl you can at least connect them to sea-faring even if the island the minigames take place on is much more tropical than anything they’d reasonably encounter. However, you’d really have to stretch the imagination a bit to justify the presence of the Egyptian and caveman characters. The weapon unlockables are much less exciting since they all seem functionally identical, but they do toss aside theme for the sake of being goofy, and being able to mix and match character items so your masked island native can be swinging a plunger around or the prim and proper explorer girl can be swinging a spiked is appropriately silly. The minigames also at least try to be somewhat rooted in the island aesthetic, with things like lava, jungle plants, and ruins being common threads and the icy areas not feeling too at odds, although the areas in the sky do seem completely disconnected from the theme. Looking cute and following a theme closely can’t salvage the threadbare minigames and their poor presentation, but it at least makes the game a bit more charming and lends some appeal to the few games that do almost work.
THE VERDICT: The cute and clean island style of Marooners is wasted when it makes contact with the substance of this poorly conceived party game. In an attempt to easily achieve exhilarating chaos, the quick-swapping presentation of its minigames fails to excite because the minigames were made too rudimentary, players either having little time to get invested in them before things shift abruptly away or, when the quick-swapping mode is disabled, they have enough time to realize how shallow and insubstantial the minigames are. With the treasure point system skewing things too heavily in favor of certain minigame types and even dedicated minigame types like arena offering little to support their simple concept, Marooners ends up confusing when it’s trying to be frantic and bland when things have the room to breathe.
And so, I give Marooners for Xbox One…
A TERRIBLE rating. Save for the cute diverse cast, anything that has the time to register with the players is likely to leave a sour taste in their mouth, and when viewed through that lens, it’s no wonder the game wants to swap you around between games so quickly. A few minigames do definitely have potential, such as a lilypad game where the ones you step on fall a second later and you can box enemies into a drop and the game where rock blocks fall from above and you must mine yourself to safe spaces while dodging, but then other minigames in this package copy their basic design and provide nothing interesting while doing so. Since you have to experience them in batches of six and can only mildly customize what kind of games you’ll see, you can’t exactly curate things to prevent the inevitable sameness across the games, and there just isn’t much strength to the basic designs that keep getting repeated across the minigames. When you’re meant to fight each other you feel weak even with the power-ups, when you are meant to scramble for treasures they are often not abundant enough to make it a true competition, and funnily enough, while the game can be set to inflict extra chaos upon players, the random factors that often make party games exciting aren’t as present. In games like the totem-toting one it’s easy for a player to run away and earn points before handing it off quickly when its about to explode, and in the lava pit game the statues don’t fire often enough to be a credible threat. The few ways randomness has a meaningful impact on play rather than just being random for the sake of it are things like the AI oddly self-destructing or a bomb clearing out everyone but perhaps one or two fortunate players.
Marooners had a self-inflicted need to rapidly pull you from game to game, and while microgames such as those found in WarioWare have pulled this off to great effect in multiplayer, Marooners tries to unilaterally apply similar controls and concepts and ends up making the different games feel both too similar to stand out but varied enough that you can’t be guaranteed the same actions are universally beneficial. A few games do have stronger breaks from the norm that could almost work, but even then those might not be as rewarding as one of the lightly altered versions of the core minigame designs you see recycled. Marooners is just too chaotic for its own good, not having the substance needed to feed its wild swings but suffering because it believes it had to make certain allowances to pull its game swapping idea off at all.