Rabbids Land Review

A party for two.

The Rabbids Land box art features 14 of the wide-eyed, buck-toothed Rabbids doing wacky things in an amusement park, all surrounding big, bubbly text exclaiming, “THE PERFECT PARTY GAME.” That’s a bold claim for a four-player game that really only supports two at a time.

To Rabbids Land’s credit, it takes full advantage of the Wii U’s wide-ranging gimmicks, and with one player on the television and the other on the GamePad screen there’s an asynchronous element to each game. While one player steers a boat with the Wii remote, another blows into the GamePad’s microphone to push explosive penguins at their opponent. You use the Wii remote to run away from me, I chase you using the GamePad. Sometimes you’ll turn the GamePad vertical, flip the Wii remote sideways, tilt, waggle, or touch. Rabbids Land is all about creating different one-on-one interactions, leaving the other two players waiting for something interesting to happen to them. For those actually playing Rabbids, the mini-games are serviceable standards that amuse in the same way these games often do – they’re simple and empty.

In the odd case four friends interact together, it’s in a limited capacity such as three players betting whether or not another will answer a quiz question correctly. These are rare occurrences during the process of playing the Rabbids Land board game, which, like Mario Party, is the excuse for playing mini-games. It’s also an excuse for Indiana Jones and other pop culture references in an amusement park setting. Here, you’ll roll dice, move around a board, and try to collect trophies, whether that’s by sabotaging friends with traps or winning mini-games to earn your own.

Rabbids Land suffers from the same issue party games like this often do: Watching your friends play a video board game isn’t fun at all. The slow-paced presentation of rolling dice and watching the Rabbids move to their space is agonizing. When it’s your turn to step up, there’s cheap thrills in rolling balls using the accelerometer or shouting at a friend where they need to be.

And this emphasizes Rabbids’ greatest problem: You spend most of your time not playing it. Even then, when you’re lucky enough to land on a mini-game square, the game itself is likely uninspired. Worse, mini-games open up in groups, leaving you to grind through the same games until more unlock.

THE VERDICT

Rabbids Land doesn’t make much sense as a party game. It has little ambition and middle-of-the-road execution. Nothing about this mini-game compilation stands out above any of the others we’ve seen on Wii – or Nintendo 64, for that matter. Worst of all, it’s exclusionary and isolating for the majority of the players most of the time. So, no, this isn’t the perfect party game – it’s quite the opposite.