Party Animals Releases to Negative Reviews Upon Release For Misunderstanding

It feels like we've been waiting for Party Animals to release for years — ever since the Father of YouTube, Pewdiepie, covered it back in 2020, the game has been on a lot of people's radars. Its greatest success still lies in being the most anticipated title by a landslide, holding the first place in Steam charts as the most-wishlisted game for years.

Unfortunately for Recreate Games, shortly after release, Party Animals was bombarded with negative reviews regarding several things, but the most catastrophic one is the game's wording on its official store. As various reviews on Steam put it, the team promised the release of an offline mode for the game upon release, though throughout its various playtests leading up to the release all the way to the release itself, Party Animals never featured an offline mode, and users were angry.

On a Steam Discussions post, a Discord message, and an update, developer Nemo wrote a message addressing the wrong wording. The original one in the store was as follows:

"Fight your friends as puppies, kittens, and other fuzzy creatures in PARTY ANIMALS! Paw it out with your friends both online and offline. Interact with the world under our realistic physics engine. Did I mention PUPPIES?"

Of course, it's unmistakable that an offline mode was offered, but in the various posts shared with the community, the team explains the reasoning behind the misunderstanding. Recreate Games is a Chinese company, and they have claimed the issue was a translation rather than a false advertisement. Clarified in the posts was that Party Animals has no intention of adding an offline functionality, and it is not in the plans at all for the team.

The new wording for the page has been changed according to the criticism received, where now the same sentence reads as follows:

"Fight your friends as puppies, kittens and other fuzzy creatures in PARTY ANIMALS! Paw it out with your friends remotely, or huddle together for chaotic fun on the same screen. Interact with the world under our realistic physics engine. Did I mention PUPPIES?"

Despite its expected success, Party Animals has now struggled to recover from the original bombardment of negative reviews regarding this controversy. Some are due to the misleading wording, others due to the pricing practices, and others because they still yearn for offline play despite the correction, but as it stands, the game holds a 62% positive score with over 10,000 reviews, sitting comfortably at Mixed at the time of writing.