The Jackbox Party Pack games are synonymous with fun times with friends at home or even online. The game series has long been a staple of many party situations and offers a fun variety of games that while short, prove to be great substitutes for the lack of party games at one’s home. With the release of Party Pack 10, does Jack still have the power to amuse? Let’s find out in my Jackbox Party Pack 10 Review!
Games
A Jackbox party pack is only as good as the games it offers. So I will talk about the experiences my friends and I had with the pack.
Timejinx
A fun take on the trivia game genre which was our personal favorite from this entry. Instead of offering players choices or options as to what the answer could be, you are given a question and you must answer it using a range. E.g “The year Michael Jackson released Thriller” and the range will be from 1970 – 2000.
Players have to input a year from that range, and the closer you are, the less points you get. Following Golf rules, the person with the lowest points wins the game. We all had fun with this and we had a blast playing this game the most from the pack
Fixytext
In Fixytext you are given a category, followed by a prompt – all of you then share the same reply box without the ability to delete words. It’s kind of like the game “one-word story” but you have a character limit to tell the most absurd story possible.
Other players score you depending on how funny they find your words. We had a decent amount of fun with this, but by the 2nd playthrough, we got bored of it pretty fast. Could be fun with more people, as we were a group of three.
Dodo Re Mi
Similar to Tee K.O 2, many of us are passive rhythm game fans, and at the tutorial level the game had players operating 6 guitar strings at once where even Guitar Hero eases you in with 4. This was a complete mess to play on a computer and iPad and easier on a phone, but then it makes the game way too unbalanced depending on the device you’re playing it on.
Tee K.O 2
My friends and I are not fans of drawing games, because none of us are particularly good at drawing and we all play on a mix of computers, phones, and iPads. As such, we all agreed to skip this game. There is certainly a bias with this particular style of mini-game on my end, so I can’t really attest to the quality of it.
Hypnotorious
We were not able to play this game as it had a 4-player minimum requirement and we were not able to find a 4-player.
Accessibility & Options
The beauty of Jackbox games is being able to play them anywhere, as long as you are able to share the game. I hosted a Discord group call with my friends and was able to play the games with them. As mentioned at the start of the review, we all played on a variety of devices with no problem.
While the inevitable Discord lag was there due to the 720/30FPS nature, you can instead opt for Google Meet which could potentially be better for streaming the game if you are playing this online with friends.
The ability to play these games on any device means that the entry for the game comes down to just one friend owning the game and a capable PC of handling streaming it, but otherwise, the game does not have any strict GPU/CPU requirements.
While we all agreed that Dodo Re Mi was the most unfavorable game in the bunch due to being a rhythm game and the one on phone would have the most advantage, it still stands that Jackbox games are definitely very favored for friends who don’t own a gaming computer but you also want to enjoy being able to play with them, and this series fits the bill once again!
Presentation
The presentation style is similar to the other packs. Each game offers very stylized cards and animations that don’t need any heavy CPU or GPU. Most computers today can easily run the game and the only thing that matters is being able to stream it with as little difficulty as possible.
The cartoon-esque visuals are the central identity of Jackbox games and it’s good to see the game stick to old trends instead of trying something new so that the games feel familiar instantly.
Conclusion
Jackbox Party Pack 10 is definitely one of the weaker entries in my book. I play the games frequently with my partner and gaming friends for us to have fun together, I would say this is a decent bundle of games, but due to the personal bias of our group against Tee K.O 2 and the inability to run Hypnotorious due to the lack of a 4th player did not play a major role in our decision that this was easily our least favorite party pack.
We had a ton of fun with Timejinx and Fixytext, and we definitely look forward to trying Hypnotorious at a more opportune time, but unless you and your friends are fans of drawing and rhythm games, our personal take on the entry was that this is the most okay package by far.
What did you think of our Jackbox Party Pack 10 Review? Share what you think about it in the comments below.
This review is based on the PC version of Jackbox Party Pack 10. The key was provided by Indigo Pearl and Jackbox Games.
