Gacha games are fairly popular and some studios are doing some very interesting things in the genre. One of my favorite gacha games since I started playing them was CyGames World Flipper, a game that just had their global release shut down recently. However, CyGames runs multiple gachas so I knew a new one was right around the corner. World Flipper was a novelty as you were collecting people to form teams of three that would act as pinballs in a large pinball game. So seeing a global release of the Umamusume: Pretty Derby gacha coming soon has me excited and seeing some fanfare related to that by releasing a party game had me interested as well. The first ten minutes were incredible as a friend and I partied our butts off against two CPU opponents. Then things took a nosedive.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash
Developer: Cygames, Arc System Works
Price: $45
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash is a party game that takes place in the Umamusume: Pretty Derby universe, known as Uma Musume or really, whatever you want to call it. In this universe, anime girls known as ‘horse girls’ (though they look just like anime women) participate in horse racing. A friend and I immediately jumped into a game together against two CPUs, straight into the deep end, and had a pretty great time. We each picked a premade team of five girls and started participating in events. We played a round of Basketball, jumping hurdles, Dodgeball, and a strange cooking and eating competition. Honestly, we were having a blast with these minigames.
After getting into another game together, we quickly realized those four minigames were all Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash had to offer, which was extremely disappointing. So I decided to hop out and start the single-player campaign, which is a thing that exists. In the single-player campaign, you pick a team and go through seven chapters of, you guessed it, those four minigames. The story is fairly boring, consisting of various anime tropes like not having the courage to do something or courageously trying to win an event for someone else in the girl’s life. While there are four teams to play the stories for and only seven chapters each, I couldn’t bear to sit through most of the uninspired dialogue and setup for each event. And at this point, I’ve won the Slap Dash Grand Prix enough that victory has lost all meaning.
The unfortunate reality of Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash is that each minigame is pretty fun and has some depth to it. Basketball and Dodgeball have special shots, charged shots, and ways to knock out your opponents. The cooking and eating minigame, which I found very enjoyable, has you collecting and building combos based on the color of the plate the food sits on. The hurdles minigame actually has you running through six different areas with lots of beautiful pixel-art backgrounds and obstacles. Each obstacle has a little yellow strip in front of it to indicate when to hit your charge button and, if hit correctly, get a little “perfect!” on the screen and a little boost to shoot ahead of your enemies. The minigames are quite good.
The goal of the single-player appears to be collecting fans and coins. With fans and coins you can purchase items in the clubhouse, tickets to unlock new girls, or expand your clubroom, and that’s about it. The unfortunate part of Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash is that it’s just not a fully realized game, and for the price tag, that seems unreasonable. There are a total of 30 girls that you have to individually unlock with tickets to create custom teams. However, the four pre-made teams have almost all of the girls in them so you’re really just looking to customize to do well in this silly party game. And it’s not like you’re at a particular disadvantage for using the pre-made teams, all the girls are good at something.
Each girl has a rating on their Speed, Stamina, Power, Guts, and Wit stat. Each Umamusume has special skills for each event and there’s some overlap between girls but many have exclusive skills. There are four girls that are locked until you finish the campaign for each team and one girl is locked behind 50,000 fans. If you purchase a game console and place it in your clubhouse, you unlock Golshi’s Grand Adventure 2 which, personally, I think should’ve been the main game.
Golshi’s Grand Adventure 2 is an auto-scroller auto-shooter that’s inspired by games like Vampire Survivors. Gold Ship runs along a track with obstacles and baddies running her way and just a simple water gun to fend them off. As the baddies die they drop experience crystals that can be picked up and, when leveled up, give you a choice of new weapons to pick up. New weapons can be things like a spread-shot on your water gun, a lightning attack from the sky, or a drone that spins around Gold Ship to ward off any baddies that get too close. Truthfully, if a more fleshed out version of Golshi’s Grand Adventure 2 were the primary focus and there was a little more depth to the game, this review would be quite different. However, tacked on as a secondary option in a multiplayer party game doesn’t make it the saving grace one would hope it was.
Aside from that, there are a lot of other little things that really made the experience less than fulfilling for me. The game has no ultrawide support and can only be played at 1920×1080, there are only 30 girls in total, and though it recommends playing with a controller it always displays the controls for both keyboard and controller. And I don’t mean side-by-side, I mean they show a keyboard control for almost three seconds before it flips to the controller control for about three seconds and then back. It’s a bad system and when you’re in the middle of a game, that will get you knocked out.
Overall, I have to say I’m pretty disappointed with Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash. The game is quite good looking and has a lot of fanfare for fans of the Uma Musume series but provides an extremely hollow experience full of basic UX missteps and a complete lack of depth. Golshi’s Grand Adventure 2 isn’t enough to save this game and the price tag for what’s being provided is absolutely absurd.
The Final Word
Considering for roughly fifteen bucks more you could buy the latest Mario Party game and get considerably more for your dollar, I simply can’t recommend Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash.
MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
