Pool Party Panic

There are many kinds of jobs in this world, but some are more demanding than others. Some are fun and rewarding, with potential for a great career after some years of effort, while others are just soul-crushing grinds that eat away at your youth. Even so, everyone has to make a living, and sometimes there’s no other choice.

Pool Party Panic is an interesting arcade game in which you play the role of a lifeguard as he tries to keep guests happy by taking care of their needs. Hence, whether they need lotion or a dip in the pool, it’s your job to help everyone have a good time. The mechanics are very fast-paced and addictive, but at this point the game is still in early access, so it doesn’t feature too much content.

You start small with just a pool to take care off, which is fairly easy, depending on your patience and reflexes. The main concern is the sun itself, because it affects the guests as the hours go by and you need to pay attention to their temperature. If they get too hot they burst into flames, so it’s important to prevent that as often as you can by rushing them into the pool.

Things get more difficult to deal with after a while, given the fact that the levels get tougher later on. Hence, it’s a lot tougher to handle all the guests when you have multiple pools under your care, especially since the controls are a bit counterintuitive if you use a mouse only. Thus, the character follows your cursor on the screen and you do not even have to click, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not the classic way you might be used to.

As far as the graphics are concerned, they are actually quite nice, even if there’s not a lot to see most of the time. The small environments are nicely designed, on the other hand, and the animations are fairly fluid, not to mention the nice colors. Even the sound is nice, although there’s obviously not a lot of music included as of yet.

In the end, Pool Party Panic has all the required components to become an addictive game when it’s all done, but at the moment is has a few flaws, such as the small levels and the weird controls. Even so, it’s definitely worth a try if you like fast-paced games with interesting ideas.