Family-friendly party games can be a great way to introduce a younger gamer to our hobby of choice. Messy Up is a party game that offers you the chance to destroy the home of a frantic pet owner. Playing this game solo is not recommended but you might be hard-pressed to convince people to play with you due to several game design issues that make it less fun than it could have been.
The game has two game types. Mess Up is a co-op story mode and Battle is where you can play local co-op in a level with custom settings. Both modes support up to 4 players with the difference being that in Battle, some players can play as owners.
You start the game with your choice of three family pets and one owner. The pet’s goal is to destroy all items in the house like couches, desks, etc., before being caught. All the while, the owner’s goal will be to capture all of the out-of-control pets. Pets can be grabbed three times before their hearts are depleted. When their last heart is lost, the owner can put the caught pet in a time-out pen. You can be freed from the pen by another pet, but once all pets are caught, the game ends.
Each pet has a stamina-limited dash and a special move to give you a better chance of escaping your owner’s attempts to grab you. There are environmental hazards that can help pets stymie the owners, but most can also backfire and make it easier for them to be caught. As the pets are destroying the furniture, items can sometimes fall with an outlined arc. If an item crashes to the ground without being caught by a pet, it will alert the owner and enrage them.
Messy Up is developer Liquid Meow’s first game on the Xbox. While I applaud the effort, the game just isn’t fun because of some core design issues. Every menu in the game was designed for a PC player with a mouse while console players have to use the left stick to control a slow on-screen cursor. This makes every single menu take longer than it needs to. Then there’s the gameplay… As a pet, it seems like your stamina meter is always empty and as an owner, the camera is incredibly zoomed in with no way to zoom out. It’s a shame because the art style, the models, and the environment all look pretty good, and remind me of some other really fun party/co-op games.
Conclusion
In my opinion, it’s a real shame that Messy Up falls short, as there are the makings of a good game here. It just needs a little more care to optimize the menus for consoles and to fix some gameplay mechanics. I just can’t recommend this game when there are other games that do it much better.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
