Review: Lunch A Palooza – PS4

Party games and local multiplayer brawlers were the go-to titles when I was growing up. Me and the boys would get together on the weekend, bury ourselves in the snug, and commence battle in Super Smash Brothers Melee and Tekken until the early hours of the morning. Once we’d spent the night fighting over who is the best, which typically ended with Jonny Youd going mental and grabbing the other controllers and then “winning” by himself, we’d tuck into our sleeping bags and doze off for a few hours.
Lunch A Palooza managed to skip over everything and send me straight to dreamland. It’s not great, then, and it’s going to be a hard one to recommend.

Lunch A Palooza is a party brawler game that, as the name suggests, is centred around food. You take control of different food items on various food-themed stages and do battle with either the A.I controlled opponents or up to three other players. I mainly played two-player with my boy Charlie, but I did give the game a go in single-player. Unfortunately, neither way was fun.
The idea is that you need to knock your opponents out of the arena until they’ve spent up their lives. The last food thing standing is the winner. Simple. Or it would be if the game wasn’t so confusing. For one, it’s really hard to read what’s going on at any given time – there’s simply too much clutter. Secondly, the basic movements are wild and no matter how much I tried to grab an opponent with the square button, I could never do it. Sometimes I did, but without meaning to. Not great, then.

There are a few game modes ranging from free-for-all, team matches, and king of the hill, as well as a mode where you spawn in as a new food every time you die. Honestly, none of these game modes did it for me, and the latter was just downright annoying; spawning in as a new food was confusing because I’d lose track of who and what I was. It wasn’t fun, and even Charlie, the four-year-old reviewer-in-training, wasn’t impressed with the game either, and he normally quite easy to please.
I like the general idea of a big food fight and I’ve love to see the developers have another crack, but first, back to the kitchen to re-jig the recipe, because this meal is not very tasty.

Lunch A Palooza PS4 Review

• 4/10
  Overall - Bad - 4/10

4/10

Summary

Lunch A Palooza is a great idea and at times it does show a bit of promise, but the overly-chaotic screen clashes, iffy controls, and lack of staying power really don’t do it any favours. I’d love to see something a bit more fleshed out though, but as it stands, I’d rather be doing the pots than playing this one.