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Reviews:
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What can make the game exciting, but is also its greatest weakness, is its sheer complexity and how with so much going on it can be hard to tell what to do or be effective without simply trying and failing. For people who want to embrace the sandbox experimentation it’s likely going to be interesting and full of possibilities but for anyone looking for things to reveal themselves a bit more easily I’d imagine it will be confounding. Further exacerbating the issues are the dense (and generally difficult to navigate) menus full of information that can be a challenge to easily break down and work with, as well as the controls that can be equally awkward whether in docked or handheld mode. In the end there are some positives to be taken from Happy Birthdays but you really need to be in love with the concept and the core gameplay enough to dedicate yourself to getting over the hurdles it generally throws in its own way. In many ways the game feels unrefined and not quite fully-realized, more of a hodge podge of ideas thrown together and put on a shelf. Truthfully this does put it firmly with many other efforts in this genre, high-concept games that collapse a bit under their own ambition. While there’s enough here to be worthwhile it’s absolutely not going to be something just anyone will be compelled to thrown a ton of hours into.
Justin Nation, Score:Fair [6.0]