The Jackbox Party Pack 11 review for PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo

Jackbox Party Packs are, by their nature, a mixed bag. Every year (except last year, when we had the Jackbox Naughty Pack and Jackbox Survey Scramble released separately), we get a new batch of 4-5 games. Invariably some are really good, some are less good – and, without fail, the “good” and “less good” ones will vary depending on who you’re talking to.

Consequently, it should come as no surprise that Jackbox Party Pack 11 follows the same pattern: a few of the games are fun, and a few are less fun. What makes this year’s edition harder to judge, though is that the distance between those two poles is a lot smaller than usual – and, if I’m being fully honest, the weighting probably skews more towards the “less fun” side.

Out of the five games here, there’s only one that I’d say is solid without any qualifiers: Cookie Haus, a drawing game where you have to draw cookies based on weird orders from unusual clientele, like a vampire who wants a creepy cookie, or an Old West lawman who wants something magical to diffuse tension. It’s hardly the most incredible drawing game the franchise has ever seen or anything, but it’s easy to figure out right from the get-go and it’s not insanely demanding – which, when we’re talking about party games, are sometimes the most important things.

The rest, unfortunately, are even more of a mixed bag.

Take Hear Say, for example. It was probably the biggest hit of the bunch in my friend group, but it’s got some pretty clear problems. The gist of the game is that every player is supposed to make noises into their phone (see, a cute car horn, or hysterical joy), and then the players vote on which were their favourites. While it’s fun hearing your friends make weird noises, the execution leaves a little to be desired – you and your friends can’t all make noises at the same time, or else your phone will pick everything up and the game won’t be able to figure out who made what noise. On top of that, you’re all in the same room, making noises in front of each other. It’s already fun as it is – having your voice come out of the TV with a funny animation doesn’t usually add that much to it

There’s also Doominate, where you compete by ruining prompts – for example the game gives you “A day at the spa”, and you add something that would ruin it, like “But you have crazy stomach issues!” It’s a mildly fun idea, but it never comes close to achieving the heights of other Jackbox joke games. Improbably, it’s still probably the third-best game out of the five featured in Jackbox Party Pack 11.

This is because the other two feel pretty half-baked. Suspectives, for example, is a social deduction game where you answer a survey and then have to figure out who the criminal was based on who lied about their answers. That could potentially work, except you don’t know who answered what, which makes a lot of it guesswork based on nothing. Even if you’re playing with four people, for example, the game only doles out one survey answer at a time, so it’s very easy to bluff your way through things all the way to the very end. Case in point: in one of my matches, it asked players whether they liked learning big secrets. Everyone said they did, so we wasted a whole round of guessing with nothing to go on.

Still, even Suspectives is more fun than Legends of Trivia, Jackbox Party Pack 11’s trivia game (as the name probably suggested to you). It’s a turn-based RPG where you and your friends set off on a quest to fight monsters by answering trivia questions, and it’s incredibly slow-moving and dull. I appreciate the Jackbox folks trying new things (especially with another Trivia Murder Party scheduled for next year), but Legends of Trivia drags on way more than a party trivia game should. It’s fun, of course, to answer trivia questions, but the rate at which they’re meted out here and the glacial pace at which games move forward – to say nothing of the fact that it’s basically impossible to lose a game, since everyone wins in the end.

I wish I could say that everyone wins in the end when playing Jackbox Party Pack 11…but they really don’t. It’s certainly a step up from last year’s Naughty Pack, but the games on offer here are too inconsistent to be worth your while. As always, a good group of friends can always probably make anything fun, but it’ll take a lot more effort here than you’d like.

Jackbox Games provided us with a Jackbox Party Pack 11 PC code for review purposes.