PANTY PARTY / DEVELOPER: ANIMU GAME, HORNGYEUAN DIGITAL / PUBLISHER: COSEN / PLATFORM: PC, SWITCH (REVIEWED) / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
We’re all in favour of daft games here at Starburst – the dafter the better, to be honest. Strolling through the sillier side of genre entertainment often takes some unexpected turns. Most of these lead to underwhelming dead ends, but very occasionally we find ourselves confronted with something that even we, the custodians of craziness, the overseers of obscure, can’t quite get our heads around.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Panty Party.
From the Land of the Rising Sun (where else?), Panty Party was initially released on PC earlier this year and has now made its way onto the Switch of all things (there’s currently no sign of a PS4/Xbox One release). Traditionally, Nintendo have tended to shy away from this kind of sauce, but despite what you might imagine from the name, there’s no smut or filth in Panty Party whatsoever (we’ll understand if you stop reading right now). These panties are very very clean indeed. As the trailer wastes no time in telling us, “No hentai contents in this game! All you get is funny and stupid panties!”
There may not be any filth, but there’s a ton of insanity. Basically, a girl called Yurika finds herself talking to a pair of knickers (here referred to as a singular “panty”) in the middle of the street. The panty and Yurika are both understandably surprised by this turn of events, and Yurika turns into a panty, tasked with fighting the evil Panzi and his/her/their (who knows?) army of unloved (but, we hope, not unwashed) undergarments. Or something. It’s absolute nonsense.
The battle against these pugilistic panties rages fiercely across almost 20 missions. Fighting isn’t too much fun though, as combat is as simple as pressing one of three buttons to perform your attacks. There are no combos or anything, so it can get quite repetitive rather quickly. There are also usually only a handful of panties to take down in each mission, so you’ll be in and out in no time at all. Achieving certain objectives in each mission will unlock a brand new panty, each with its own stats and attacks, so at least you can change your panty if you get fed up of your current one. You can amass quite an appealing knicker drawer by the end of the game.
Any unlocked panties can be used in arcade mode, which is basically the main campaign without the story, where you fight through a branching path of mini missions, each culminating in a battle against a super-strong boss panty. There’s also a multiplayer mode, where you can battle against up to three other friends!
While the gameplay might not be the best, it’s still entertaining in a “what on earth is going on” sort of way. Cracking theme tune, too. Treat yourself, you can hear it in the trailer up there. Probably not recommended for those of a serious disposition then, but you totally already knew that as soon as you decided you were going to read about a game called Panty Party. For the rest of you maniacs out there, if you were intrigued by the name and this review backs up your suspicions, you’re probably going to enjoy this one. There’s even a physical limited edition coming soon, which rather amusingly “cannot be cancelled or returned” because it comes complete with an actual panty inside the box!
