Disney’s Guilty Party is nothing if not original. The game focuses on a family of crime-fighting super sleuths who are beseiged by a masked villain named, Mr. Valentine. The entirety of the game takes place in specific cases, where our heroes attempt to thwart Valentine’s schemes and stop his henchmen from wreaking havoc.

Even as a singleplayer experience (and despite the huge emphasis on story), Guilty Party still plays out like a sort of party game. Players will find themselves playing through a series of rounds, during which they deduce the identity of that level’s villain. Between each round, Valentine attempts to interfere with your sleuth by either playing cards or forcing you into a minigame to remedy his wrongdoings. The cards play a big role in the game, allowing players to use them to perform different actions. Mr. Valentines cards do things such as lay traps, lock doors, and turn off lights. Several of your cards allow you to overcome these obstacles, with others giving you extra action tokens, moving around suspects, and other various utilities.

The action tokens are the core focus of what really makes this into a party game. These tokens dictate how many actions you can take a turn. Each movement requires one action as does searching for evidence, and interrogating suspects. Both interrogating suspects and searching for evidence boil down to minigames. You’ll find yourself piecing together memories, putting words in the suspects’ mouths, cracking safes, pummeling testimony out of people, and a whole wealth of other games. Many of these play great, though the IR aiming can be touchy on ones that require precision (a pox on all hypnotizing pocket watches!). I wish that there had been Wii Motion Plus support to help with some smoothing when the cursor got off screen, but I was mostly happy with these minigames.

 

After digging through the massive pile of red herrings thrown your way, you’ll start to notice key physical characteristics of the guilty party in question. You keep track of all evidence, as well as these physical traits in your casebook. The traits are divided into four categories: hair length, gender, weight, and height. Each of these traits is binary, so you’ll always be looking for someone with long or short hair. Once you have all four traits filled in, it’s up to you to figure out which suspect matches. When accusing the suspect, you have to point to the piece of evidence that proves the guilty party matches the trait. If you fail in your accusation, nothing happens, though if you fail three times, you lose the level.

Guilty Party is tied together by a surprisingly sweet little narrative, that is at times clever, and at others a little more adult than I would expect out of Disney. The voice acting is pretty awesome across the board, and the writing helps support this.

Unfortunately, though all of these elements have among them the makings of a great game, none of it really comes together as a singleplayer experience. The whole experience feels really lonely, and the repetitive nature of some of the minigames quickly becomes apparent if you’re performing all of them yourself. Fun tidbits like nabbing hidden cards and tokens in the backgrounds of rooms just don’t feel satisfying when there’s no one’s face to rub in your victory. Solving the mystery quickly feels redundant when you’re by yourself, and the whole thing lacks any sort of compelling reason to stick around. Luckily, Disney’s Guilty Party has a key word in it’s title that brings the whole game together (and it isn’t Guilty).

 

Guilty Party was never intended to be played singleplayer. I feel like this mode was only in there so that people wouldn’t hammer the product for requiring more than one player. The core of the experience lies in solving missions with the assistance of your friends and family. The developer, Wideload Games, told us as much at the game’s launch event, but I didn’t quite understand just how reliant this game was on multiplayer until I got my hands on it.

 

Though the main story plays out in the same way regardless of how many people join in, the fun of the game really comes to life when other detectives are added to the mix. Cases are solved much faster this way, as each player has a chance to head out and interrogate suspects. The mid-mission hazard minigames with Mr. Valentine are much more fun with several players helping out at once, juggling various tasks, and generally getting in each other’s ways.

Playing the game this way really made the experience come to life. Despite the cooperative nature of this mode, we often found ourselves competing with each other to perform the best in minigames and to find as many hidden tokens as possible.

All of the game’s multiplayer modes can be played with up to four players, and only one Wiimote is ever required (though it’s more fun if everyone has their own). There is a great ease of use to the multiplayer, as you can drop players in and out at your leisure and save your mission progress at any time if you get hastily interrupted.

The story mode isn’t the only multplayer offering in the title. There is also a competitive mode included in the package as well, and it’s one that adds a whole lot to the package. Whereas the main missions have the same culprit and suspects every time you play them, the competitive mode spices things up by randomizing these elements. You can also tweak the difficulty of the case itself, which is a fun addition that I would’ve appreciated in the main game too.

 

When going head to head against other players, you’ll be racing to fill in your clues as wuickly as possible, while hiding the nature of the evidence from your pals through the trusty truth-o-meter. This device allows you to detect whether a suspect is telling the truth or lying, and is all but useless when playing co-op. In multiplayer, though, you can hold down the ‘1’ button to switch the evidence from true to false or vice versa. This will always keep your opponents on their toes, as they won’t be able to use evidence you’ve colelcted to solve the case for themselves. This mode can take considerably longer to get through a case, but it is pretty satisfying to be the first to get all the necessary evidence.

I’ll just keep saying it again and again. Guilty Party is a mutliplayer title at it’s core. To that end, it’s largely enjoyable, and offers plenty of fun for people of all levels of gaming experience. Though a game with the Disney brand attached to it wasn’t the most appealing package to me out the gate, Wideload Games delivered a title that more than lives up to its “party” moniker. The fun inherent in playing this game with others was one of the biggest gaming surprises for me this year, and means that I’ll definitely be paying attention to Wideload for whatever they decide to do next.