Inspector Gadget - MAD Time Party

My spreadsheet instincts kicked in about forty minutes into MAD Time Party, and the numbers were not kind. Sixteen minigames. Four city zones. A completionist clock that barely clears ninety minutes. These are the structural facts of what Smart Tale and Microids have shipped, and they do most of the reviewing for me. The setup has Gadget chasing down time-machine parts to deal with Dr. Claw's latest takeover of Metro City, with three ancestor variants of the Inspector serving as CPU rivals across the minigame rounds. You move through a third-person open-ish hub, locate NPCs marked on a map, and trigger the next challenge. Minigames include things like Pass the Bomb and Count Them All, plus a Gadgetmobile driving sequence where you dodge obstacles through the streets. The controls are serviceable, and the skip mechanic for failed minigames is a smart concession to younger players who might bounce off the more randomly-decided challenges, like the wire-cutting one that even seasoned players have noted feels more like a coin flip than a skill check. The problem is not that any single minigame is catastrophically broken. The problem is that there are only sixteen of them, most run under two minutes, and once you've seen them all you've seen everything the game has to offer. Graphically, MAD Time Party retains the cartoon colour palette of the original series, which is one of its more honest qualities. The voice acting lands somewhere between passable and grating depending on which character is speaking, though several players noted Gadget's own performance holds up decently. The soundtrack, composed by Tanis Chalopin, the daughter of the franchise's original creator, is a genuine point of interest and feels appropriately tuned to the IP. The rest of the production, however, reads like a game that was built on a hard deadline rather than a creative one, with animation quality and performance sitting well below what even a modest indie budget can produce in 2023. The one scenario where MAD Time Party stops being a frustration and starts being a passable evening is local co-op with kids under ten who grew up on the rebooted cartoon. The four-player local mode, the low difficulty ceiling, and the familiar characters combine into something that functions as a forty-five-minute distraction for a family game night, which is a specific but real use case. Anyone older, or anyone expecting the kind of systems depth that even a budget party game like the older Mario Party handheld entries offered, will hit the content wall fast and hard. Steam's Mixed rating on a small review sample tells the same story: the nostalgic and the forgiving gave it a pass, the rest did not. For strategy and sim players drifting here because of the co-op tag, there is nothing here for you. No decision trees, no resource loops, no late-game anything. MAD Time Party is a children's interactive cartoon with a game layer thin enough to see through. That is not a condemnation of the concept, but it is a precise description of what the execution delivers. Diego, Scout Team

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