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Vibrant and colorful graphics; booger jokes
Severe lack of content; being way too overpriced; incredibly repetitive music and sound effects
As I’ve grown older, I’ve really lost touch with the world of toys. For the most part, if a line of toys didn’t exist about ten years ago, I probably won’t know it without seeing some obnoxious commercial. This is the case with a recent line of toys called The Trash Pack. Heck, the first thing I thought when I heard the name was that it was a reboot of the Garbage Pail Kids. Sadly, The Trash Pack toys are not so clever or funny. It seems to be yet another set of collectibles aimed at youngsters, this time featuring a forgettable troupe of garbage-themed creatures. I remember the good old days when the word “dookie” made me burst out into laughter and anything that included farts was hilarious. Okay, to be fair, dookie is still kind of funny. Those types of kids who enjoy gross-out humor and toilet jokes are precisely who The Trash Pack toys are aimed at. Of course, like any toy craze, a video game has to be made after it. And yes, of course, like most of these games, The Trash Pack: The Gross Gang in Your Garbage for Nintendo 3DS is a forgettable cash-in that really shouldn’t be on the shelf with other 3DS games.
Don’t get me wrong, I know The Trash Pack is aimed squarely at kids who like the toys, but this game is so bare bones and devoid of content it’s shameful. There can be great games based on collectible toys for kids, but this is not one of them. The entire game of The Trash Pack is four minigames. That’s all; there’s nothing else. Just four simple games to replay ad nauseam until you have earned all of the virtual Trash Pack critters from scoring points. Simple time-wasting minigames don’t have to be very deep, but they need to be compelling, and most of these games are just boring, plain and simple.
First off, we have Trash Drop, a minigame where you hold the A button to aim a Trashy at a crane to collect garbage. Then you have Trash Attack, a game where you run back and forth to collect empty cans while avoiding terrifying hazards like old pizza and moldy bread. Third, there’s Trash Toss, where you use the stylus to flick a Trashy into garbage cans. The controls for the stylus flicking are really imprecise, which can make Trash Toss really annoying. Lastly, we have Trash Catch, in which you drive a garbage truck to catch trash that is miraculously falling out of the sky. Trash Catch is actually not bad, I managed to play it to completion by scoring over 1000 points. The others were not so engaging. These games all just feel like they were hurriedly cobbled together for a toy game to make a quick buck.
Speaking of bucks, this really shouldn’t be a full retail priced game. I experienced every event the game had to offer, earning a third of the Trash Pack characters you can win, in just 45 minutes. The Trash Pack would be better suited as a discounted eShop game, or better yet, a 99-cent smartphone game. You could take your kid on a trip to a real landfill and let him play in the sludge and get better value than this game.
As for presentation, The Trash Pack is, unsurprisingly, rather unimpressive. When the game’s in motion, it really is a bit of a mess. The animated sprites of the characters are sometimes pixelated and blurry, and some graphics are incredibly small and tough to see. The 3D effects are just used to make menus and items pop out, so don’t expect any crazy uses of the feature here. It plays just as well with the 3D slider all the way down. In fact, the graphics on the menus are about the best bit about the entire game, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for the rest of it. The sounds in The Trash Pack are also just as repetitive as the minigames. Each Trashy seems capable of only making one of three annoying sounds, and he repeats them over and over again. The music is dull and uninspired, in fact I think I started to fall asleep during one of the games because I was so bored.
Honestly, if you’re a nine-year-old kid who collects The Trash Pack toys and happen to be reading this, where are your parents? Who gave you a computer? The Trash Pack for Nintendo 3DS is a seriously overpriced and uninspired game. It’s a bad game, even by the standards of most licensed games for kids. There are flash games on the internet for free that are better than this. The Trash Pack: The Gross Gang in Your Garbage should just stay in the waste basket.
Nintendojo was provided a copy of this game for review by a third party, though that does not affect our recommendation. For every review, Nintendojo uses a standard criteria.
