Family Party Fitness Fun is a fun collection of 30 mini-games for the Wii, which allow up to four players to compete to see who can get the highest score.

The game is compatible with the Wii Balance Board, although it’s not necessary to have one in order to play.  A few of the games do use the nunchuk as well, and you won’t be able to play those if you don’t have one.

All-in-all, there are 30 mini-games which offer a great variety of activities and opportunities for competition.  Family Party Fitness Fun is a bit of a misnomer, as most games don’t involve a “Fitness” element, although some of them do.  You can also select certain “tours” (like the “Fitness Tour”) which easily organizes all of a certain type of mini-game together.

There are two gameplay modes to allow you to play the mini-games, which are accessible from the moment you start the game.  Party mode lets you build your own “playlist” of up to 10 games to compete in, and Limit Mode present with you games in a random order.  In both modes, you are competing with other players to do the best you can in each game, and finish with the highest score.

One thing that we did notice, however, was that during the Party Mode, even though the cumulative scoreboard would update after every event, we weren’t able to track where we were in the game list, and the game also seemed to end abruptly once we finished all 10 events.  So if your family is really competing hard for the high-score, make sure to pay close attention, or you might miss who won.

With nearly 30 games, there’s bound to be a few games your family will really love, and a few they may not care for.  Some notable games that we played including Ball Drop, which is more of a puzzle type game involving using paddles to direct balls into different buckets, and skydiving, in which players direct characters through rings as the fall to the earth.  The important thing in Skydiving wasn’t speed, but rather accuracy, so even though a player may finish last, if they went through the most rings, they can still win the event.

Although each game does have a tutorial mode, it’s a bit difficult to understand, and you have to go through a few button presses to learn how the controls work before each game.  Once you start an event, you won’t be able to access the tutorial, so we found that we learned how to play a lot of the mini-games by trial and error.

Although there really isn’t much of a Fitness component to this title, overall we were impressed with the majority of the mini-games in Family Party Fitness Fun.  We found it easy to jump right into the game’s Party and Limit modes, but did experience a bit of a learning curve in learning how to control each mini-game.  Ultimately, we think there are enough fun moments of gameplay, and an easy to understand scoreboard to make this a great game for competitive families.

INFORMATION FROM COMPANY FACT SHEET
Family Party: Fitness Fun™ is the fitness game specifically created with kids in mind exclusively for Wii™.  Family Party: Fitness Fun features 4-player simultaneous multiplayer games including boxing, roller derby, dodge ball, and more.  For the first time in the Family Party series, Fitness Fun includes the Wii Balance Board™ providing even more active challenges.  Players can choose from over a dozen cute characters dressed head-to-toe in customizable workout outfits, break a sweat as they compete and unlock new games, and achieve high scores and win medals!  Offering hours of convenient at-home entertainment, Fitness Fun is a great value at $19.95 for kids to share with their family and friends.

KEY FEATURES:

-30 Fun, Addictive Games Optimized for Wii – 30 Games that hide fitness elements in fun kid-centric game concepts that players will return to for multiple playthrough sessions.
  -Cardio Training: get the heart rate going in roller derby, super squash, volleyball, basketball, and boxing!
  -Balance Training: strengthen the core in skydiving, hoverboard racing, giant ball rolling, and more!
  -Brain Fitness Training: build important hand-eye coordination with games that train a healthy brain in Counting Mania, Smart Dieting, and Steady Hand!

-Play With Up to 4 Friends – Fitness Fun is entertaining for the whole family with support for up to 4 players in Party or Time Limit mode.

-Workout the Entire Body – For the first time in the Family Party series, players will be able to use the Wii Balance Board in over 10 events to get the whole body moving for a workout geared toward making healthy and fit kids.

-Choose Your Own Friendly Character to Play – Players can play as any family member or friend with over a dozen cute characters dressed from head-to-toe in customizable workout outfits.

-Achieve the Highest Score and Win Medals – Players can mix and match games to create their own unique challenges against friends and family to be the best all-around or establish the highest scores on the leaderboards.