Get ready to party with your friends and some Piñatas as Microsoft’s latest offering sees our favorite colorful characters come to life in the shape of Viva Piñata: Party Animals.

Party Animals allows you and up to three other players (offline or on Xbox Live ) to play at any one time. The tournaments in which you play consist of a mixture of races and mini games, points are awarded depending on the position you finish in and the points from each event are then totaled up at the end to determine the overall winner.

There is quite a variety of mini games to be found in Party Animals, however most of them are variants of each other, still they are quite fun. One of the mini games has you trying to jump over a spinning spatula to collect the sweets and the person to collect the most wins, however the spatula speeds up the longer the game goes on and provides some comical moments when you see yourself getting whacked out of the arena. Other minigames see you burping at your sailboat to get it to the finish line first and there are also some where you need to shoot at targets, but like I say there are quite a few and you will unlock more as you progress through the tournament.

The only problem with the minigames is that you have no control over which one you play, this is because they are predetermined in each tournament, and although you will find that each tournament offers a different choice, it would have been nice if you could have chosen these yourself.

Perhaps the most fun you will have in Party Animals is in the Racing, although there is a limited number of tracks, the game makes up for this by providing different weapons you can use, some give you wings, others slow your opponents down and of course the boost is there to help you out should you be falling behind in the race, if you still can’t win with all this help then you also have the option to keep the game close by visiting the games settings menu.

The games controls are very easy to pick up, the trigger is used to run, with the face buttons being assigned to jumping, using special moves and weapons. It is good to see such simple controls in a game like this as anything else would have made the game less friendly for younger users.

Graphically the game really does look fantastic, the graphics look exactly like the previous Viva Piñata game, each of the eight characters look great as do the environments. The sound is also impressive, the commentator has some great voice work and all the effects are as they should be.

Viva Piñata: Party Animals is a very simple game to play, there is no doubt that this game should be judged as being targeted at families and in this respect it does a good job, should you have a family who enjoy to play games together then this is probably the idea game for them, it’s pleasing to the eye, easy to pick up and and a lot of fun, however if you are a hardcore gamer who is looking for his next challenge then I’m afraid you wont find it here.