Review: Rainbow Puffle Party

I have made it quite clear how I feel about the Club Penguin app.  So, when it was announced there would be a mobile exclusive party, I groaned.  How could this be any good?

Mini parties, by their obvious nature, are pretty hard to review.  What is there to say about three or less rooms and a handful of items?  How do you rate a mini party compared to full blown party?  What is the perfect mini party?

This event - the Rainbow Puffle Party - throws an additional wrench into my job: the stability of the platform that it is presented on.  The Club Penguin app barely works on my iPad....not to mention the one disastrous time I tried it on the iPod.  The lag and long load times prevent me from having any fun with it and barely allow me to actually look at anything.  Obviously, the app must work for other people. (How else would Club Penguin have been able to achieve the milestone of having more people on mobile than on desktop computers simultaneously, as Spike Hike announced a few months ago?)  So, how much do bugs actually work against a party?

Bugs not being accounted for, this event is not bad at all by mini party standards. The three rooms that are decorated are really cool, the free rainbow puffle for everyone gimmick is neat, the music isn't bad at all, and the free items, though unfortunately weighed down by wait times, are nicely designed.  For a puffle centric party, it exceeds expectations.  Sure it doesn't compare favorably to the great maze we got last month, with its easter eggs, smart humor, and challenge.  But, it isn't a waste of time either.

But while I like this party, I can't get over how unstable the app is.  For this reason, while I always encourage as much content as possible, I wouldn't really want one of these special exclusive parties on the app every single month.  That being said, I'd much rather have the team working on exclusive content for the app than porting everything on the desktop to it and wasting more time than is needed.

Really, in short, there is no winning.

Even so, the Rainbow Puffle Party is a nice distraction for a few minutes of fun.  Its wait times are unnecessary and being on the desktop would have been beneficial, but its vibrant color and neat designs are enough to be satisfactory.

Score: 6.5/10