Last year Rare created the utterly sublime Viva Piñata and not only proved that it was still a developer to be reckoned with, but that it was more than capable of beating Nintendo at its own game.

It’s now scarcely a year later, and the main characters from the developer’s delightful title have been shoehorned into one of the worst 360 releases we’ve played for some time. Granted, it’s pretty obvious that Microsoft was going to use Rare to attract a younger audience to the 360 – Rare’s tutelage under Nintendo resulted in a slew of N64 hits that were often just as good as Nintendo’s first-party titles – but this move has backfired drastically.

Viva Piñata: Party Animals is basically a Mario Party clone with all the fun sucked out of it. While some of the ideas behind the mini-games are entertaining, the simple button-pressing gameplay is about as fun as sticking needles into your eye.

No doubt realising that most 360 gamers aren’t going to be impressed with simple mini-games, Krome has also included a Mario Kart-styled race that takes place between each game and awards you bonus points depending on how well you perform in it. While it’s reasonably diverting for a few games, you’ll soon get bored with the simplistic track designs and annoying voiceovers that constantly repeat the same irritating catchphrases until you want to ram your head through your TV screen.

It’s definitely a nice looking game, and obviously designed with small children in mind, but so are films such as Toy Story and Monster’s Inc, and if they can appeal to a mass market, why can’t something like this? To be fair, we’re not even sure if Rare could have saved this festering turd, and we dread to think what direction the franchise will be heading next. In fact we couldn’t really care. Viva Piñata, you’re already dead to us.

Darran Jones