The Jackbox Party Pack 12 Review – The Partying Persists

The Jackbox Party Pack 12 is Jackbox Games’ newest release, and it is certainly making a splash. This is a breath of fresh air among Jackbox releases, an eclectic collection that feels like a new era of Jackbox. Party Pack 12 shows that Jackbox Games still has original, fun, new tricks and games up its sleeve.

Party Pack 12 features five completely new games: We Forgot a Card, MegaPals, Debate and Switch, Idol Factions, and Hyperface. Some games had better presentations than others, but the pack was strong and extremely enjoyable overall.

We Forgot a Card feels like Quiplash, but with cards. It emphasises writing funny responses where you respond to specific cards instead of random lines. The premise is the same, though: you get a prompt from a greeting card and respond with something funnier than your opponent.

The greeting card format feels fresh enough to stand on its own without feeling like a Quiplash sequel. It’s an enjoyable game, to say the least, but it does still feel very similar to other Jackbox offerings. While the greeting card twist is fun, this pack includes stronger games.

MegaPals is all about being on the same wavelength with your friends. The group gets a prompt, then everyone says the first words that come to mind. It goes rather quickly, so you have to think on your feet to get as many answers in as possible. That isn’t the only goal, though. You also want to match answers with your friends. The more matches you get, the more points you receive.

The gameplay could be more streamlined, as it feels a bit chaotic. Most of the chaos comes after the round, when the excess, unmatched words fill the screen and the most-voted word becomes the next prompt. Some words are funny and got a lot of votes, but they didn’t make great prompts for the next round. The best part of MegaPals was seeing whose minds were on the same page, and it’s an interesting way to see how well you know your friends. We had loads of laughs seeing who could match each other the most.

Debate and Switch was honestly a fan favourite among our friend group. It’s full of absolute chaos, and we enjoyed every single second of it. In this game, you submit debate topics, and one person argues for the topic while someone else argues against it. You have 30 seconds to argue your side, and while each person debates, everyone else picks which side they agree with most.

You scroll across the bottom of the screen to show how far to lean towards one side while the two debate. The further you lean toward a side, the more points they get for that side. Then everyone chooses a word to replace, and the debate starts again, with the loser picking which side to argue for.

The fourth game in the pack is Idol Factions, which is a team-based trivia game. Now, this game is something that none of us had ever really seen before. There are three different categories in the middle of the playing field. Each team gets different words or groups of words, and you have to pass them to each other to sort them into categories to score the most points. If you miss it and put it in the wrong category, the same topic will pop back out, and you will get fewer points because you missed it the first time.

One issue we had with this game was that we were all playing online on a Discord call. Since I was the one streaming, we all had to stay in the same call so everyone could see the screen. The issue, though, was that both teams were trying to communicate at the same time, which made things a bit difficult. You had to not only communicate answers, but also throw bombs at the other team. With so much going on in-game, and even more in our voice chat, it was really difficult to organise. We all agreed it would be much easier in person.

The fifth and final game included in Party Pack 12 is Hyperface. When I started this game, I was absolutely horrified. Why, you may ask? Two reasons: firstly, I am absolutely horrible at art, and I usually struggle with Jackbox artistic games. Secondly, we had some great artists in the group, which always makes me a bit nervous. Hyperface is completely different than most artistic Jackbox games, though.

Hyperface gives you pictures of humans with a prompt, and you are able to manipulate them in a variety of different ways to match that prompt. You can use tools to shrink, grow, and stretch the pictures that you are given. There are also drawing tools and makeup tools, which honestly made the game seem so much more playable than most Jackbox games that are solely based on drawing. We all had quite a great time playing Hyperface, especially because nobody had to be super artistic to make a great photo reaction. A fun twist on this game is that you can also take selfies as well!

The entire pack felt extremely refreshing compared with recent Jackbox Party Packs. These were five entirely new games, and to me, it shows that Jackbox Games has a lot of new ideas up their sleeves. By the 12th pack of games, it’s difficult to keep things interesting, but they succeeded in every sense of the word. The visuals were all fresh and amazing, and the music for each game was also extremely pleasing. Debate and Switch and Hyperface were by far the highlights of the night, but all of the games were a pleasure to play.

This is a stellar collection of five completely new games, rather than introducing more sequels, like previous Jackbox Party Packs. Jackbox Games didn’t need to reinvent the wheel for The Jackbox Party Pack 12, as they clearly have plenty of new ideas to keep these party games fresh. With five fresh games, a whole lot of laughs, and only a few hiccups, Jackbox Party Pack 12 shows that even after twelve different packs, there’s still a space for something new for game nights.

Angel reviewed The Jackbox Party Pack 12 on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.