Marooners Review (PS4)

Marooners is a party game that consists of a collection of mini-games thrown together to form a short, competitive title. Each game will only last a measly five minutes with up to four players local or six players online battling it out to be the last one standing in each mini-game.

In arena mode you battle against your opponents, hitting them with your weapon in order to knock them off platforms to their demise. You can also pick up power-ups that’ll give you some sort of advantage: a bomb or a punching glove that are more powerful than your normal attacks. In party mode the main goal is to collect the most treasure; often this treasure is just scattered around the map but you will gain a huge reward for being the last alive in each mini-game.

There’s not a huge variety in mini-games, you can see every one of them within a couple of games and a lot of them feel very similar. One requires you to run around on a bunch of Lillipads as they fall close behind; you must attempt to knock off your opponents. Another requires you to avoid getting squashed by falling blocks from the sky. Another makes the screen 2D and you must dig down as fast as possible; the slowest diggers getting killed when left behind. There a bunch more but we won’t detail them here. Each one doesn’t last very long and isn’t that exciting to play either but with the right people it can be an enjoyable experience.

Although an excellent idea having the ability to play online, the online play is deserted; the community is smaller than 1,000 players according to the online leader boards. It is so difficult to find anyone online that you’re just left alone playing against bots all of the time and to be brutally honest it’s no fun as the AI constantly get stuck or kill themselves.

Marooners on the whole lacks a lot of polish, with a lot of bugs and inconsistencies throughout. The AI will kill itself or get stuck and the attacks feel inconsistent; heck, sometimes you will get launched off a platform and other times you’ll hardly move an inch. The visuals look a bit rough around the edges and the menus are very basic.