Elves in Paradise: Elf Bowling 2 (PC)
After millions upon millions of people downloaded the original Elf Bowling title, developer NStorm had to know a sequel was bound to be a hit as well. Releasing one year after the original to welcome in the year 2000’s holiday season, the sequel wasn’t just going to be another bowling game despite its deceptive title. Elves in Paradise: Elf Bowling 2 would take the Christmas game away from the North Pole and onto a tropical cruise for a new sport and a new theme that is essentially the inverse of Christmas in July.
Following The Great Santa’s Elf Strike of 1999 and Kris Kringle’s inappropriate response to their demands by making the elves into bowling pins he gleefully knocked down again and again, Santa capitulated and granted the elves much of what they had been requesting. Besides changes to the workplace though, part of the settlement includes Santa taking the elves out on the S.S. Kringle Cruise ship to enjoy some island hopping in Micronesia. While Santa’s away though, Mrs. Claus decides to hand over responsibility for the Christmas holiday to Santa’s deadbeat brother, a used ice salesman named Dingle Kringle. Dingle decides to press his luck though, challenging Kris to a shuffleboard competition for the title of Father Christmas, although a victory for Dingle leads to what the game alludes to as some unspecified but likely lascivious reward from Mrs. Kringle. With only the elves on hand to help execute this bet with an unusual wager, Santa and Dingle begin to launch the little elves out across the ship deck in a three round competition to earn the most points possible.
Much as in the first game, the humor is really more of the game’s draw than the gameplay, the elves all having pitched-up voices and a selection of voice lines that can at least last two or three games of shuffleboard before they really start to get repetitive. The tropical cruise aesthetic comes with all the elves now wearing tight speedos, the Kringle brothers launching them across the deck by pulling back and snapping these swimsuit bottoms with the expected exposure of the cartoon elves’ buttocks. Constant butt shots will be coupled with some elves who have unique appearances like one that is heavily sunburned or one covered with body hair, but most of the humor comes from what the elves say either before you launch them or after they’ve come to a stop. You can expect some basic double entendres like an elf declaring he has crabs before pulling out two of the crustaceans and giggling or another elf talking about a nearby elf’s impressive package with little attempt to veil the perverted meaning. They can get short with the Kringle brothers or tease them for their throws and some can be found doing something goofy before you grab them, one elf whipping out a boombox to sing to while another spends his time hula hooping. The juvenile jokes continue with one who completely loses his swimsuit to reveal a pixelated censor bar, while references without much thought to them like “Who let the elves out?” try to reproduce the mild creativity the first Elf Bowling found in turning the song Ice Ice Baby into something that at least sounded vaguely reminiscent with Elf Elf Baby.
The humor leans towards raunchiness without ever crossing the line into something outright mature though, the game in fact rather immature with its humor but not necessarily bad for it. It will definitely amuse the same kind of players who got a kick out of the first Elf Bowling release, and it at least feels a bit fitting for a silly little game about using elves as replacements for shuffleboard pucks.
The shuffleboard itself is a step up from how bowling was controlled in the original game, in that you need to actually consider a few variables before launching your elf down the lane. The shuffleboard set up has a long stretch down the ship deck in front of you where a considerable amount of the lane provides no points whatsoever, but if you can get your elf nearer to the edge of the boat, you can start earning points as indicated by areas marked with white lines. A sizeable 100 point zone, a smaller 200 point zone, and a much smaller 300 point zone are found as the elf grows closer to the end of the lane, with risky players earning more points the farther their shot goes. If you can get the elf to teeter right on the edge above where the hungry sharks wait to snap up any elf that overshoots the lane entirely, you can even snag 400 points. Naturally though, sending them over the edge will lead to the player earning no points from that elf whatsoever. With three rounds of play with players launching four elves per round, you aim to get as many elves as you can into high-scoring zones, but as you and your opponent alternate turns, you can knock the other player’s elves off the edges to invalidate their points. This can also mean you nudge your own elves deeper down the lane or even place a deliberate obstructing elf to try and mess with your opponent, but a comeback mechanic exists where some elves can be worth double or triple points, meaning what little strategic play can be attempted is easy to get around by a single well launched special elf by the losing player.
Launching an elf is a fairly simple process. You pull back their bikini bottom to make a power gauge cycle from low to high, the player needing to time their shot so it has a useful amount of energy behind it when the elf is fired. It’s fairly easy to find out how high the meter needs to be to actually get your elf to the right part of the ship deck for higher points. This means most of the power meter is simply there to punish poorly timed launches, a patient player usually able to get in the right ballpark for their launch strength. Each of the three rounds has a different condition to them though that influences where in the lane you fire your elf. The first round is relatively smooth, the ship’s stability indicated by a tilting image that remains rather calm in round 1 and mostly just adds slight curves to shots based on your timing. Round 2 has the ship hit rough waters, the lilting of the cruise ship causing the sliding elves to hook off to the side more often unless you time your launch for when the indicator says its safe to fire. The last round is known as Hurricane NStorm, and while the ship looks just as calm and steady as it has every round, the radar showing the water’s conditions shows that the ship is apparently rocking quite violently. If you don’t time things right this round, you can see your elf curving hard to the side and spilling into the gutters. While the weather conditions add an important consideration to how you hurl your little elves, there is a drawback to this small layer of depth. There is nothing demanding you take your shot save for when you’re good and ready, and with both the power meter increasing automatically and the rocking of the boat happening at its own pace, if you want to guarantee a good shot with your elf, you might spend a long time waiting for things to line up properly. No external pressure will appear to force you to keep playing and there’s no incentive to do anything but wait for the rocking deck and power meter to finally align perfectly, meaning in the final round especially you can spend a long time waiting if you wish to assure your victory with a well placed shot.
In fact, the rocking ship mechanic only really seems to hurt the experience. The game would certainly be too plain without it, but it artificially lengthens the game for anyone who wishes to do well, the waiting game slowing things to a crawl as it begins to crop up in round two and especially round three. You can’t be much of a slouch either, since in Elves in Paradise: Elf Bowling 2 you’ll either be going up against another human player who pretty much has all the same tools for success as you or a computer player who plays shuffleboard surprisingly well. When the AI is in control of Dingle, he won’t make many egregious errors, sometimes sending an elf or two over the side but able to competently earn decently high scores that keep things competitive. He is going to be able to time his shots better than you of course and you thankfully don’t need to wait for him to do so as the game just has him launch almost immediately on his turn, but beating Dingle requires that slow but effective play style that isn’t very interactive or exciting.
There is a glacier with penguins on in far off in the water though, and if you want to earn an unfair edge against the computer player, you can move your mouse cursor over and begin to shoot the penguins down. They try to escape by balloon, but each shot penguin is 5 points, and the numbers add up quickly if you’re persistent. There’s nothing forcing you to take your turn so you can keep shooting penguins until they stop spawning for that round as well. Unsurprisingly this feature is gone in a human vs. human match, so that at least removes one design idea that would lead to even more frequent pace breaking. Keeping the point value low was wise at least so it’s not vital to your success and it’s mildly amusing to snipe the tiny birds. However, NStorm repeats a rather flawed idea from the original Elf Bowling to interfere with points earning far too much. Sometimes, a giant Moai head will plunge down and completely wipe out an elf before the player has had a chance to launch it, meaning they completely miss out on one round of play. Coupled with the prominence of elves worth extra points, and the game lets randomness strip away a lot of the potential strategy that the shuffleboard format could have allowed.
THE VERDICT: Shuffleboard was a smart direction to take Elves in Paradise: Elf Bowling 2 to make it a bit deeper than the original’s straightforward bowling, but the variety introduced to play here is constantly undermined. Hitting different point zones or trying to knock enemy elves off the ship seems strategic until the game liberally gives the losing player more valuable elves to invalidate your work, and a random event can lead to a turn completely lost for either player. The tipping ship mechanic pairs incredibly poorly with the power meter’s automatic movement, meaning the best strategy is often to wait a long time for the proper window to pull off the kind of shot you’re looking for. Elves in Paradise: Elf Bowling 2 is mostly a vehicle for juvenile humor, the gameplay a drag since the sport side of things was sabotaged by short-sighted design concepts. It might give you a laugh or two, but the play side of things dries up once the deceptive illusion of depth disappears.
And so, I give Elves in Paradise: Elf Bowling 2 for PC…
A BAD rating. Elves in Paradise: Elf Bowling 2 is better than the original in that you can’t just win by performing the same action over and over, but by making the power meter more involved and the positioning more important because of the weather conditions, things end up dragging on far too often. The ingredients for an involved sport are there, but by having a player rely on two elements out of their control to succeed with a shot, an attempt at playing well is bound to be tedious and drawn out. Dingle being a good AI opponent actually harms the game because it requires consistently decent play from the player and thus plenty of waiting on two variables to align in the desired manner. A casual play of Elf Bowling 2 where winning isn’t considered important is likely going to be done by many players just to see the little jokes the elves tell, and since the game has a free 60 minute trial before you need to pay for it, it’s fairly easy to see all of the game’s small joke repertoire without paying a cent. It’s not going to be an uproarious experience and some of the jokes are tired or lazy, but the humor has its audience who likely won’t care about the shuffleboard being so reliant on perfect timing.
Perhaps because NStorm knew that players cared more about the jokes they didn’t consider the flaws in their play design. One easy way to kill some of the needless waiting would be to have the power meter swapped out for the elves going farther based on how far back you pull their speedo, a meter perhaps best left out entirely so players can’t just easily hit the same strength every time for guaranteed points. The extra point elves need to be dialed back since they seem to appear even when the losing player isn’t flagging that badly, and the Moai stomp just seems unnecessarily mean and would be an easy trim to improve the title. The game doesn’t need to be stripped of its silliness to become a bit more enjoyable for the sport it features, and the immature humor has a better chance of landing if it’s delivered at a better pace instead of after long wait periods. It really feels like Elves in Paradise: Elf Bowling 2 had the potential to at least be a decent diversion instead of something that grows old or irritates even in your first run through three rounds, but sadly, the decent shuffleboard design is hampered by design choices that relegate Elves in Paradise to the same spot Elf Bowling 1 found itself in: something you only play because it is Christmas time and anything with a tie to the holiday will fulfill that seasonal itch. At least this time around though you can nearly squeak out some okay multiplayer matches before the game rapidly grows old.