Volley Pals is a arcade style, pick up and play volleyball romp for up to four players.  Choose from a selection of wacky characters, like a cheerleader, blob alien, monkey, etc., and play a simple game of volleyball on an assortment of courts.  It’s available to play on Switch, Xbox consoles, and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

After selecting a character, you can choose which team to be on as well as any bot CPU players.  Up to four can play, two on each team.  You can also edit rules like how much needs to be scored to win, how much time you have, etc.  Then you choose a court and play.  You can only move left and right and jump.  If you hit the ball three times on your side of the court, the other team gets a point.  You can also score if the other team misses and the ball lands on their side of the field.  Simply jump to hit the ball, and depending on where it’s it, you can even put some ‘English’ on it to send the ball in a certain direction.  It’s kind of like Pong in a way, except you can jump and there’s gravity.

Probably the best part of the game are the courts you can play on.  There are quite a few, and each one has a quirk you must watch out for.  For instance, in the haunted mansion court, a ghost can pick up the ball and throw it anywhere.  In the science lab, portals can take the ball to unexpected places.  After you unlock all the courts, you can even edit your own by using parameters from the other fields.  My only problem is that you must play and finish a game before unlocking a new court, but at least it’s still easy to do.  The only other problem I have is that there’s not much to this game.  It could’ve used more characters, or maybe a story mode for single players.  As it stands, it’s a bit bare boned, but still a fun simple little multiplayer sports game, especially if you have a lot of people to play with.

Kid Factor:

Nothing violent or objectionable here.  Reading skill is helpful for some of the menu text, but not necessary just to play.  Volley Pals is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews