Review: JACKBOX PARTY PACK 10 Has 3 Fun Games
Jackbox Games has launched their latest Jackbox Party Pack 10. This brings 4 brand-new games to the Jackbox family as well as one sequel game. These games can be a lot of fun to play with friends and family both in-person as well as online with support in 6 languages (English, French, Italian, German, Castilian Spanish, and Latin American Spanish). You can play the game now on Nintendo Switch, PC (via Steam), PlayStation, and Xbox consoles (affiliate link) for $34.99. Jackbox was kind enough to provide me with an early review code on PC but the thoughts below are my own.
The bulk of this review will be a focus on each individual title in the game with the score reflecting on Party Pack 10 as a whole. However, I do have to go on my obligatory rant since it’s a Jackbox Party Pack. Dear Jackbox, for the love of all things that are holy, please create a unified launcher for the Party Packs. You can still sell the games in these Party Packs. It’s so annoying to have more than one of them though and having to exit one Party Pack to go into another because your group wants to play that really fun game that isn’t in the Party Pack that you started the night with. Just release a unified launcher for all the games that you have already purchased via the Party Packs. PLEASE!
Tee K.O. 2 is the first game in Party Pack 10. This is a sequel to Tee K.O. from Party Pack 3. I never played the first one, but I did enjoy Tee K.O. 2. You and your friends draw pictures for t-shirts, tank tops, and hoodies and then you come up with slogans. Then, the drawings and slogans are randomly distributed to the different players who have to pick one of each to enter into the competition. The competition is just a popularity contest and I wish there was a points system so that the writer and artist for the winning shirt could get some glory. They do get credited during the competition, but some kind of points system could’ve made it even better. That being said, the groups that I played with all had some fun with this game. One complaint that came up in the games I played was people felt like the directions were not super clear. If it had happened just once, that would be one thing, but it happened in both groups. It is also a little awkward how you can vote for your own shirt. The game supports 3-8 players.
Next up is FixyText. I personally feel like there’s a good game somewhere here, but at the end of the day, it’s nothing but pure chaos and it’s not even fun chaos. Essentially, your group will vote for what kind of text conversation to be having with someone (flirty usually wins in my experience) and then you’re divided into two groups (maybe more with bigger groups). A group will be given a skeleton of a response message and then they have to come up with a response at the same time with the backspace and delete keys disabled (I never experienced this playing on Android, not sure why). Then, the second group gets to vote on their favorite parts of the response, but are limited to voting for individual words. This is a weird way of scoring points as words on their own aren’t typically funny, but phrases and sentences provide context to make those words funny. Sadly, this game falls flat. You can play FixyText with 3-8 players.
Third is Hypnotorious. This is a game that does take a second or third play through before you start to get it and it gets fun. At least that was my experience. The players are grouped into different categories and each one is assigned a random thing to be their new identity (oxygen, chicken, etc.). You are then tasked with answering questions as your identity and use the answers as clues as you try to figure out which players belong in the same category as each other. Then, it turns out that there’s an outlier and at the end you have to vote for who it is. The trick is that the outlier doesn’t even know that it’s them. The outlier bit feels a little weak and sometimes it feels too easy overall, but it’s probably the third best game in the pack and definitely one worth playing. It supports 4-8 players.
Then, we have Timejinx. This might be my favorite game in Party Pack 10. It’s a trivia game that has you guessing the years for various events, but it does give you a range of possible answers (i.e., 1820-1850, 1920-2020, etc.) so it’s not too bad. Then, you score points based on how far away you are from the correct answer and you aim for a low score. In addition, throughout, there are rounds of additional trivia moments that will deduct points from your score helping you make a comeback. This is a solid way to do a trivia game in my opinion. Having a range of possible answers is a massive help and the ability to lose points in non-date trivia questions helps. My second group asked to play Timejinx a second time over any of the other games in Party Pack 10. Solid game. It supports 1-8 players.
Finally we get to Dodo Re Mi. This is the worst game in Party Pack 10 and one of the worst Jackbox games that I’ve ever played. I was excited because it was a rhythm game where you tap on your screen a la Guitar Hero to play songs. Unfortunately, it’s implemented poorly. For starters, you have to unlock songs by playing the game several times. What’s more is the song choices. There are no licensed songs which means they are all either public domain classical music or songs from other Jackbox games because you know what I’ve always been a fan of? The music in Jackbox games. It’s frustrating, but it’s not even the worst of it. As you play the game, your ‘instrument’ plays through your phone’s speaker. This means that if you’re playing online and are being courteous by wearing headphones, you have to remove said headphones from at least one ear while you play this game. Then, you don’t hear any of the other instruments while you play which means you’re playing an isolated track which makes it more difficult and less fun. Then, after everyone’s played the song, it replays all the tracks together as everyone played it which is full of mistakes and just doesn’t sound good. This is an abysmal game that feels thrown in because they needed a fifth game and no one had a better idea. This supports 1-9 players.
At the end of the day, Party Pack 10 offers three good games, a game that just missed the mark, and the poorly done Dodo Re Mi. This isn’t my favorite Party Pack, but the three decent games do make a case for it, especially if you can grab it on sale. I’d rate it about a 6.5, but I’ll round up the score to nice:
