On April 11, after 7 months, the game version number finally ushered in the release, and 45 games were approved, so that the game circle once again passed the "Spring Festival". Looking back at the first batch of game versions of this year, the platform fighting game "Party Star" that has been developed for two years is among them, and in just 12 days after the release of the version number, the game was officially launched in China on April 23.
In fact, because of the delay in the arrival of the version number, "Party Star" was already launched in the Japanese market last year, and achieved the first place in the free list on the first day of launch, and has maintained the top 20 ranking since then.
Japan Market Rankings
In China, because of the early opening of the test, many players have played in the game for hundreds of hours, so the results of the first day of the line have not been able to rank among the best overseas, but they also show an upward trend. At present, "Party Star" ranks 16th in the iOS free list, an increase of 20 places compared with yesterday, and the TAPTAP hit list is the third, with 1.42 million downloads.
So, in today's increasingly niche fighting games, what is the actual experience of "Party Star"?
Easy to get started, difficult to master platform fighting
In today's increasingly rich game categories, fighting games are becoming more and more niche, because of its high threshold for getting started, strong competitiveness, traditional fighting games are difficult to broaden the audience, therefore, more entertainment platform fighting has won the favor of many players. Among them, "Nintendo Star Brawl" is a representative of the category of platform fighting and laid the foundation for its core gameplay, and "Party Star" was born based on the experience of this predecessor.
Unlike traditional fighting, platform fighting is not aimed at emptying the opponent's blood slot, but instead replaces the blood slot with the fly value. Players can win by knocking the opponent off the field on a platform with limited footholds. In this process, players need to consider how to shoot the opponent and how to return to the field.
In Party Star, the player's overhead strike value will increase after being hit, meaning that the higher the fly value of the player, the greater the probability of flying out of the field. Players need to control the direction of flight through the joystick after being knocked out, relying on jumps and skill combinations to return to the field again, so the operation requirements for the game need to be very delicate, and in the actual experience, "Party Star" does show qualified operation optimization.
Based on this gameplay, "Party Star" has launched 1V1, 2V2, 4-person brawl, and the party entertainment mode "Football Mode", which is more entertaining overall.
However, as a game with fighting elements, it is natural to have competitive offensive and defensive confrontations. The game operation is composed of joystick, light attack, heavy attack, defense, jumping, and grasping, and forms a closed loop of scissors and stone cloth between attack, defense, and grasping, restraining each other, and retaining the multi-dimensional attack judgment of upper, middle, and lower, which avoids the player from just blindly operating recklessly, so that there are also many ornamental games in the high-end game.
In order to ensure the experience of fighting games on mobile phones, Party Star has launched two modes of operation: key combination mode and paddle mode, which continues the simple rubbing mechanism of platform fighting to push the joystick direction + heavy attack/ light attack, which can easily use different move skills, and support external handles to provide more choices for different player habits. However, other fighting mechanisms also forced the two sides to return to the game, continuing the "easy to get started, difficult to master" setting of the platform fighting game, meeting the needs of players with different needs.
Multiple characters to enhance the fun of brawl
Based on the platform fighting gameplay, the other designs of Party Star also add a lot of fun to the game.
In the game "Party Star", the overall style of the game is consistent, using a 3D cartoon graphics style, but the character image is not limited to a unified dimension, but more diversified. In the game, you can see both the Q version of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Alice", and you can see the "Savi" and "Tina" comic young girls who are partial to The Japanese and Korean styles, perhaps it is precisely because of the different styles of the character image that it can highlight the characteristics of this kind of game "Big Brawl", and this diversified character design also provides more operability for the game to go to sea.
The characteristics of different characters are also very distinct, such as the flexible and light Tina raising her hands quickly, excellent combos, and low overall damage, while the large snow monster is a heavy hero, the skill back and forth is relatively long, but the damage is considerable. In the face of the characteristics of different characters, players need to develop different coping skills in each game, which also brings a richer experience to the game.
In addition, the background music of "Party Star" is also very distinctive, the overall rhythm is stronger, and the style of electronic music is more inclined to the second dimension, which is somewhat similar to the style of the domestic music game "Meows Run", and it is easy to get involved in the atmosphere of the party game.
"Party Star" follows the competitive and entertaining design of platform fighting, simple basic operation and easy-to-understand battle rules, while having the depth of play, the design of the feel such as the number of action frames is relatively smooth, and the characters and music and game attributes match to add a lot of points to the game. For users, whether they are familiar with the gameplay of fighting games or not, they can feel the fun of Party Star.
epilogue:
After experiencing the game, the overall experience of Party Star in the rare platform fighting game on mobile is at least surprising. But despite its good performance on the free list, Party Star didn't even make it to the top 100 on the best-seller list.
The reason is that most players are dissatisfied with the pricing of game props, at present, the paid items of "Party Star" are mainly manuals and skins, but the overall pricing is high. When reviewing TAPTAP reviews, player reviews are mostly positive for gameplay and deductions for paid.
In fact, it is not difficult to understand, as a commercial game for mobile phone platforms, if you want to maintain long-term operation, payment is inevitable, and the gameplay of platform fighting is doomed to the limitations of the payment point of "Party Star", but since most players feedback that the pricing is too high, perhaps the official needs to be optimized in this regard.
However, when Gyro Jun flipped through the reviews of "Party Star", he found that most players have given suggestions for medium and long reviews, and the evaluation is relatively pertinent, including payment, monotony of the map, character balance and other issues, perhaps it is precisely because the quality of the game has been affirmed by players, in order to cause so many serious evaluations Hope that this game can get better and better, the future "Party Star" can explore a new business model while doing a good job, we wait and see.