Developed by Balio Studios, Garfield Lasagna Party includes 32 mini-games to enjoy with family, friends, and even by yourself against the AI. Set across symbolic environments such as Garfield’s house, the pizzeria, Liz’s Veterinary Clinic, and much more, join in on the fun with our friends Garfield, Odie, Arlene, and Nermal, take on the challenge and participate in the lasagna party!

Time to grab the family or a few friends and begin the lasagna party. Start out by choosing 1 of the 3 modes on offer. The first option is Lasagna Race, a board game style, where you race around the board collecting as much lasagna as possible. Before you begin you have a few options, including the length of the game which changes how many rounds you’ll play, the difficulty of the AI, and how many players you are wanting to play with. This mode people might find quite similar to Mario Party, by competing in minigames as you progress around the board to earn lasagna, and the better you place the more you get. This was the more enjoyable option when playing with people, but for some reason, we got the same minigame a few times, leading to repetitive gameplay.

The other 2 modes are Challenge Mode and Competition Mode, and both are quite similar. In these modes, you purely play minigames. In Challenge Mode, you can manually select which mini-game you want to compete in, whereas in Competition Mode, you choose how many games you would like to play and they are chosen at random. With each mini-game you win, you earn lasagna, and the person with the most by the end wins, naturally. This is a good way to just enjoy the mini-games and get a chance to experience them all.

If you don’t have enough players you are forced to have AI in the game to fill in the empty spots. This is where the difficulty option comes in, with the lowest being easy, the AI still seemed pretty competent and was sometimes a good challenge to verse. As for the highest difficulty being hard, you can expect things to be a bit more difficult, and they were, being almost impossible to beat in some games.

The game only has local play with no online mode, so it was lucky that I had the chance to sit down with some of my family members who have a good range of experience levels. My niece adored the game and wanted to play again the next day, so it’s safe to say this has a good appeal to the younger generation. As for myself, I did enjoy it for a short while, but I felt it got repetitive a little too quickly with not a whole lot to keep me stimulated.

With a decent variety of mini-games, 32 to be exact, there’s going to be some good ones and some bad ones, and this was certainly the case. With most of them having a unique control scheme, some were more challenging than others. For example, there’s one where you walk around sucking up spiders and flies with a vacuum. The controls for this one relied purely on the left joystick to move and turn your camera, then when you start using your vacuum, you continue to use the left stick to aim. in another, you had to grab and throw snowballs at each other, this used both joysticks; left to control movement and right to control the camera. This kind of change and inconsistency of controls frustrated me a little, but with that being said there were some mini-games I enjoyed.

One I liked was a temple run style. Your goal is to run away from dogs while jumping over fences and sliding under clotheslines, but be careful, if you accidentally hit them the dog will catch you. Getting to the end leads to a final dash, and mashing A the fastest will lead to victory. With a selection of 32 mini-games, I thought I would enjoy a good chunk, but unfortunately, the was only a handful I actually found myself excited to play when they came around.

The comic strips in newspapers are where most people found Garfield getting up to his antics and snacking out on the infamous lasagna. This is where they drew most of the art style inspiration from; it features a very comic strip-like and cartoon art style that really brings Garfield back to his routes. This was quite nostalgic, even if it wasn’t perfect and exactly the same, it was still nice, especially with some of the iconic scenery you might have seen throughout Garfield’s adventures. It all comes with a very simplistic sound design, with pretty generic sound effects and background music. There’s not a whole lot going on here, to be honest, just a good amount to complete the game and make it feel alive.

Garfield’s Lasagna Party can be a fun little game to enjoy with the young ones in your family, although I might recommend waiting for it to go on special. It would most likely be a game you only pick up once in a while because it can be very repetitive, so you’ll possibly find yourself putting it down after an hour or 2.

Written by: MrVibeAU