Go Play: Lumberjacks for Wii Reviews by Gamers

There's a song that goes "I'm a lumberjack, and I don't care." Well, I'm not a lumberjack, but I don't care - about this game. It's yet another minigame compilation that's slapped together to seperate you from you hard earned money.
There are fifteen games overall, but when you start playing, you can only play three games. To unlock the rest, you have to win them - by playing them individually or by winning a series of tournaments. Either way, you compete against the AI or up to three other players.
Beating a game in free play locks one more game. Beating that game unlocks one more game, and so on.
Same thing with tournaments - beat the first, and you unlock the second, and so on. There are four tournaments, but they play out in all the same way.
To win, you play the games, get points for your performance in each game, and whoever gets the most points at the end of the tournament wins.
Eventually you'll be able to unlock all fifteen - by why do they lock twelve games in the first place?
Some of the games are fun - there's a rhythm based log cutting game and a shooting gallery axe throwing game.
Other games are not so much fun. Pressing combinations of A and B buttons, then swinging the Wiimote just didn't thrill me.
And still other games are lousy - namly the never ending run on top of moving logs to collect coins or the arm tiring swinging motion of the Wiimote to saw through a log.
Adding to the lack of joy are the avatars you get. They're sterotypical characters (like a southern tough guy and southeren belle, and a ninja). There's twelve more to unlock, but I just don't care about all this locked material.
Just like Go Play: Circus Star, Go Play: Lumberjack is another forgettable mini game compliation. SKIP IT.

I rented this game with the expectation of some cheesy fun with my friends. It failed to provide that. It is a collection of minigames, most of which do not provide any sort of feigned "lumberjack" action - no swinging or chopping or sawing. It was more centered around pressing buttons or shaking the Wiimote as fast as you can, which gets EXTREMELY tiring after just a couple games.

The most frustrating part of this game is that everything is locked when you start it. There is one tournament available and three freeplay minigames. Everything else must be unlocked by winning the available tournament/game in single-player mode against 3 CPU players. This severely limited how much fun you could have playing it with other people. And, let's be honest, who is renting/buying this game to play it by themselves? We ended up having to take turns playing the single-player games in order to unlock more things to do for multiplayer. And by the time we had opened up enough multiplayer options, we were all sick of the games. A vast number of them are the same game with only slight variations - for example, the same axe-throwing game with different iterations for "get x points to win," "get the most points within x amount of time," and "get x points by hitting only targets of your color." There is not a lot of replay value in these redundant minigames.

Granted, my friends & I are all in our mid-20's, so perhaps we're too far beyond the demographic this game was intended for. But I had much higher expectations for this game being something that was kid-friendly but ironically fun for adults to play as well. Sadly, it wasn't.