There is an ancient order of party-men, those with music in their bodies and rhythm in their souls. They go from club to club, party zone to dance floor, infecting everyone with their passion, until they can’t resist and join him in his reverie. These are the Conga Masters!
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Genre(s): Party Developer: Undercoders Publisher: Rising Star Games Release Date: Sept 2016 |
Played: Single player campaign, bit of multiplayer. Platforms: PC Purchase At: Steam Source: Review Copy provided by Publisher |
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Review
Conga Master is not my usual kind of game, not because I don’t like party games but because I rarely get the chance to play them (the downside of moving around is you leave your friends spread around every corner of the world). But when I read the premise for this game and the fact it had a single player option, I couldn’t resist giving it a shot.
In Conga Master, you set out with a single goal: to become the king of all nightclubs. But the road to the throne is hard and long, and you’ll need to create conga lines the likes of which the city has never seen!
Yes, Conga Master is, as its name implies, a conga game. You come into the club and you have to dance around people, get them excited enough to follow you and then keep going until you have the entire club following your beat, your rhythm. And when they do, you just take the party with you out the door!
When you conga, you need to avoid pigs, which partygoers don’t like. You also need to gather people with specific characteristics, like character categories. If you’re skilled—which I wasn’t, of course—you can slam into structures and knock special bonus items off them to pick them up.
The most important thing is keeping your momentum going by getting new people to join your conga line. If the momentum bar empties out, you’re out, no more partying for you.
The mechanics are fairly simple but they have a lot of depth and it takes time and skill to become a conga master. As you progress through the campaign, the clubs become more complicated, the layout more treacherous and the perils (pigs, bouncers, janitors, waiters, etc.) become more abundant. So you really need to learn how to efficiently pick up the new dancers that will join your conga line!
And when you’ve mastered the single player, you get to do it all with friends in the varied multiplayer modes. It’s only local multiplayer, limiting your chances to play with people, but the modes are pretty cool. I didn’t play much of them, because I didn’t have a second player (though I managed to kick off a few games), but I played enough to get the gist of them and they are pretty fun. One in particular has you competing for the affection of a single dancer, and I can just picture the mayhem of four players crashing into one another or into the dancer to reset his mood. Controlling the game on a single keyboard is a nightmare though, so I don’t recommend it.
Love how colourful and detailed the clubs are, you can see bottles, glasses and random trash that the people leave on the ground. Bartenders are at their stations, serving drinks that no one will take, because they’ll be busy dancing in my conga. It’s pixel graphics that you see a lot of these days, but it’s the colour, the bright neon lights of the clubs, the shiny poles and the bands that make it so good.
Speaking of bands, this is a game of clubs, dancing and conga, so music is very important and I loved every minute of it. The first song, in the first ever stage, where they shout out “Conga” was enough for me, I heard it and said, “yep, hooked,” even before the gameplay did that.
Conclusion
Conga Master is one hell of a game. It’s fun, with simple mechanics but there is a lot of depth in them. It’s fun to play on your own and even more so with friends.
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TMA SCORE: 5/5 – Hell Yes! |
