Review: Hasbro Family Game Night: Sorry! Sliders

Spawn Kill has been through it all with Hasbro’s Family Game Night series. We’ve covered every single one of the games from Scrabble to Battleship to Sorry, and now that the series has come to an end, we’re going to be quite sad to see it over. It was still a lot of fun though, right? Our coverage of Family Game Night draws to a close with the final installment to the game room, Sorry! Sliders…that is, unless we can bribe EA to bring us more. Until then, though, kick back and let us bring the magic of the Family Game Night series to you!

You may be familiar with the vengeance-filled tone of the original Sorry where pawns move around the board in an attempt to return to home bases. On the way around the board if you happen to land on another pawn, you apologize quite insincerely with a “SORRY!” and return them to their home pen where they must begin another circuit around the game board again in order to reach victory. Sorry! Sliders is quite different from its predecessor. If you were to take bowling and combine it with the original game you’d have a pretty good idea of what’s going on here.

Up to four players can take turns sliding regular Sorry pawns down an alley in order to try to hit a 5-point bullseye smack dab in the middle of the board. All players receive four pawns and a scorecard, with the objective being to send all four pawns to the Home space on the scorecard by the acquisition of 7 points per pawn for a total of 28 points. It doesn’t matter which scores or equations you use to reach 7, but you must reach exactly 7. For instance, if you happen to get a 5 point bullseye, you’re required to get 2 points in order to get a pawn into Home. That’s just how it works, no exceptions!

You have a lot more to worry about than simply making enough points, though. Aiming for the bullseye and being greedy for points can get your pawn knocked out until the end of the turn, with zero points to show for it if you happen to clip the edges. Of course you can use this to your advantage by knocking your opponent’s pawns into the edges much like you’d do in shuffleboard. Sliding is done via the thumbstick and a little push, and if you’d like to add a little extra power you can draw back on the stick to add some oomph to your slide.

Sorry! Sliders comes with an Original game mode where your sole objective is to get all four pawns into your home space, Battle Box mode where cubes spawn near the bullseye, Advanced mode where he game board is always spinning, and you even have the option to create your own game mode where everyone must play by your rules. This was a welcome addition, and something that control freaks should really start to get into!

The Sliders boards and the graphics in the virtual adaptation take on a bit of a cel-shaded appearance, which is much cleaner than simple 3D modeling. As usual, Mr. Potato Head leers in the background and watches the action as you play. Other than that there’s little interaction with characters other than your avatar, so the game is a pretty bland adaptation of the actual board game, but at the very least it lends itself well to the video game medium. As I have said before with the rest of the Family Game Night titles, you’d likely be better off purchasing the real games or a bundle where you can save yourself some money, but this is a solid variation of Sorry! that you can most certainly get some enjoyment out of.

Doin’ It RIGHT: - A fun adaptation of the real game. - A great choice of an addition to the Family Game Night hub. - Great test of dexterity.	Doin’ It RONG: - More banal action that you’d probably get more fun with buying the real game. - Bland graphics. - Little replay value.
FINAL SCORE: 6 / 10