Parents' Guide to Nailed It! Baking Bash

If you're going to host a party, you might as well have some cake. Nailed It! Baking Bash attempts to adapt the popular Netflix baking show in a frantic multiplayer party game. Unfortunately, much like the cakes that contestants typically make on the show, the game doesn't ever quite live up to expectations. First and foremost, it's hard to call it a party game if it's a party no one shows up to. In order to play a match with friends, everyone needs to have the app downloaded and join the host's game via a room code. The problem here is that in order to download and play the game, everyone needs to also have an active Netflix profile. While this might seem like less of an issue for a single household, even then you're left with a house full of people staring intently at their phone screens with little interaction between them.

If you manage to actually get a match going, the party doesn't exactly kick into high gear. There might be a bit of fun in the idea of trying to cut patterns into fondant or to shape and decorate a cookie while racing the clock, but the game seems to do everything it can to take that fun away. Drawing on the small screen of a phone is often clumsy and awkward, and if someone happens to be playing on a larger tablet screen, they've got an unfair advantage. The final phase has players decorating their creations by picking items up from a conveyor belt and dropping them into place on the cake while spinning the cake to make sure it's covered on all sides. This is an exercise in frustration and futility, as you're often left waiting for the right piece to come along before finally just giving up and using whatever you can find to throw something together to present at the end. If you're looking for a party game experience without any sort of party fun, Nailed It! Baking Bash has definitively "Nailed It!"