Piñata Go Boom Review

Piñata Go Boom is an incremental job simulator developed and published by tissue inu… and that was pretty much everything I knew about the game before deciding to review it. I’ve played small games before and they tend to be a mixed bag for me. Either they’re a nice little masterpiece that doesn’t overstay its welcome or it’s too short to really settle in and bring out its full potential. The only question now is if a game about whacking toy-stuffed paper containers is worth your time and money.

You are the latest hire at P-Corp, with your somewhat creepy Supervisor giving you a simple job and a baseball bat. Every day, you'll smash piñatas, collect the toys that are in them, and sell them off to the company. It’s not exactly a conventional job, but it pays the bills, so get swinging. Just ignore all the graves of the previous employees. Wait, actually, scratch that. You should destroy them; they have loot.

I kinda liked the little story here. It at least gives some context to the areas you’ll romp through, and it sells this unsettling feeling I had throughout the game. Despite the premise sounding pretty light and nonsensical, and the graphics being quite cartoonish, the Supervisor ensures that you don’t feel like you’re just doing a job. You aren’t safe, and you should look over your shoulder once in a while. That might be due to my sleep deprivation, though, because uh… I kinda got into this game a little more than I thought.

The gameplay loop is rather simple: smash all the piñatas in the room, move to the next room, and repeat until the work day is over or you clear the last room. Get through all 10 rooms and you’ll go up a Prestige level, allowing you access to a new area with tougher piñatas, but also new mechanics and more resources.

Your character attacks automatically without any input, so you only have to worry about your movement and positioning by using the left stick or WASD. However, you start off as an extremely slow and weak Party Popper whose work day lasts only 10 seconds. If you want to improve and actually get serious work done, you’ll need to buy upgrades.

Piñatas will drop toys, which are traded in at the end of each day for coins, that you can spend at the Hub on upgrades to make your character a better basher. Eventually, you’ll need more than cash to purchase the more powerful skills, requiring different coloured tokens. For red, you’ll need to smash up graves. For aqua, you’ll need to fulfil the conditions of the toys obtained during the work day. Finally, for purple, all you need to do is Prestige. And that’s disregarding all the upgrades that will massively increase the production of these resources.

All the upgrades might seem small at first, but they can be serious game changers when stacked with other skills. With enough time, effort, and ruined papier-mâché(?), you’ll become a god of party item-based destruction/grave desecration who can earn millions in a single swing of your almighty bat! It’s honestly addictive to see numbers go up and how you’ll slowly but surely get stronger. What felt like a slight slog at the start soon became a beautiful dance of chaos with marbles, magic, and explosions.

That being said, the ride ends just a little too soon for my liking. I got all the achievements in 5.2 hours, so unless you want to max out all the counters, there’s not going to be much to tide you over. Still, it was a lot of fun for only a few pounds.

Onto technical performance, and you should know that even a potato can run this game at any FPS setting. No drops, no lag, just pure piñata pounding. No glitches either, or at least any I noticed. Honestly, I was just enthralled all throughout. If I had any gripes, well… I think the Hub menu music triggers me a little because it sounds like supermarket music that I’ve heard a million times but I can’t seem to identify where it comes from. It's royalty-free, but I can’t find it to satisfy my curiosity.

Piñata Go Boom is a nice and short time that doesn’t overstay its welcome and keeps you invested throughout. With every new area, a new mechanic is introduced to shake up the formula, even if you’re basically playing the game with one hand all the way through. Like a talented worker hired for a small project: they’ll stay for a little but leave for bigger pastures soon enough.