While I am an aging man with two daughters over the age of twenty, I’ll also proudly rattle off the names of loads of the original Smurfs, because when I was a kid they were everywhere for a few years. Yes, I proudly know that they’re three apples high and are constantly being menaced by Gargamel and Azrael because I watched the hell out of that show back in the day when Saturday morning cartoons were simply a cornerstone of kid life. While I’ve been burned over the years with plenty of awful games made from popular licenses, on the Switch I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the adventures made with the Smurfs, with Mission Vileaf being particularly charming. That gave me hope that Village Party could be similarly good, but alas it has some issues.

Really feeling like The Smurfs meets the general design and format of The Sisters, Village Party will have you take control of apparently the only Smurf with no qualifier to their name. Your goal will generally be to explore the Smurf village and surrounding areas, helping out your fellow Smurf, collect a lot of stuff, and generally stumble into various characters and settings along your way. One thing you’ll run into are a variety of pretty simple mini-games that you’ll then eventually be able to unlock a mode to let you play with some family and friends as well.

The big problem here is that it didn’t take too long to really start feeling the mileage of going around and satisfying quest objectives. More often than not you’ll be going clear across the map, not only taking up a fair chunk of time, but also inevitably tempting you to do something else instead. This results in a lot of time burned without much to show for it, as even tooling around on your Smurfway you simply move too slowly. The angle of enjoying it with friends also ends up being a letdown since there aren’t too many new ideas here, and more often than not the implementation of the various games felt like it was done better elsewhere.

In the end, if you’re really looking to get your Smurf on, I’d recommend one of the other adventures, both of which are at least generally kid-friendly and just better structured. In the same vein, if you’re looking for a mix of a single-player experience and some multiplayer party game fun, I’d be more inclined to suggest either of the games in The Sisters series instead of this. It isn’t terrible, but on a general level it just doesn’t accomplish its goals as effectively as some of its brethren.