High School Party

Whoever’s seen the stereotypical teen movies where the nerds try to crash a party with various hilarious consequences will instantly be amused by the effort this game brings to the term ‘Gate Crashing a Party’.

In High School Party you must lead a team of socially inept but highly intelligent guys who of course are armed with little else than a crash helmet, a pocket protector, sweaters their mum would’ve bought them and khaki pants with glasses the NHS would be proud of, to get the upper hand against their mortal enemy – the Jocks. Tooled with a street map of 27 hot parties where of course ‘babes’ will be present as no doubt copious amounts of alcohol, the smartest nerd of the school (Bernard D. Geekman) has cobbled together their greatest secret weapon in their fight – the Nerdinator 3000!

Ok, being serious for a moment, this is basically a spin off of the Crazy Penguin Catapult game but with a little more male emphasis and testosterone in the air. Rather than flinging black and white non-flying birds into the hemisphere, you must launch fearless nerds (who else?) into the parties around the campus to cap put an illustrious feather in the nerds cap for finishing school and getting into a party – eliminating Jocks (sport loving block-heads) in the process.

This game comprises of two basic parts, the first is the launch by hitting the fire key at the right time to chip your nerdy ammunition towards the house, and secondly, the decent of the nerds as they fly above the targeted party house.

Now, the launch is pretty straight forward and little changes between each house apart from the timing used to hit your nerd for maximum effect. On some levels there are slopes or walls in the way which will mean your nerd will splat and crunch themselves at quite a high speed into said objects rather than reach the target house. For me, this is a very entertaining touch that could have been left out by less sadistic developers, but fortunately to their credit the humour was kept, as was the animation of rather crumpled bodies.

The decent is where skill and luck plays much more of a bigger part in ‘knocking jocks’ and successfully completing the level. You start by seeing your nerd flying from left to right with the camera scrolling along with his movements. When you feel you’re at the right point you hit your fire button again to start your nerds decent. Some surfaces will break in one go, others will break in three or four hits, others will not break at all. By timing your drop correctly, you will be able to smash your way through and eliminate the beer chugging opponents by ricocheting off walls and so on. Again, if you are a little careless or just have a bit of a mean streak, you can cause your nerds to suffer a quite painful ‘accident’.

To help you win each level, from time to time you will be rewarded with improvements to pick, whether it’s extra nerds to fling, defying gravity, turning your nerd into a cannon ball for better damage dealing and better bounce-ability.

In brief, this is a very enjoyable game which will keep you playing to improve your ‘jock knocking’ skills. It’s a little repetitive but there is enough variety on offer to keep you playing and laughing as you go.

Rating 83%

Positives

Well detailed graphics

Unpredictable results

Fun, entertaining and a little naughty

Negatives

Quite repetitive

Pretty easy to complete – but hard to get every Jock eliminated

No difficulty setting changes available