Category: Nintendo News

The heart feels a slight flutter every time a new FPS hits the eShop. Is this it? Could this be the game that firmly cements the genre on Nintendo Switch? We’ve had some impressive attempts thus far (Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and DOOM), some decent offerings (Payday 2 and Paladins) and some average at best results (Modern Combat Blackout). Predictably, Beyond Enemy Lines: Covert Operations is not the upper echelon that’s going to lead handheld shooters into a bright new dawn. Instead, it manages to dig a new basement in quality that’s more likely to make your ticker tick its last tock than flutter with anything resembling hope.

Beyond Enemy Lines: Covert Operations is the gaming equivalent of the ‘hold my beer’ meme. A single-player-only shooter so inexplicably bad it makes you long for the days when Nintendo was far more stringent with what appeared on its hardware. It’s so poor it’s surprising it doesn’t turn its silenced pistol on itself the moment a new mission begins, performing a killing blow of mercy that would be far more satisfying than what actually follows. But alas it doesn’t, leaving those brave enough to accept said mission quite the experience to endure. Question is, are you brave enough to pull said trigger?

Simply put, Beyond Enemy Lines: Covert Operations is a sandbox FPS where you need to tactically infiltrate a series of locations, extract certain items or data, then proceed to complete a further objective before making your hasty exit. Sneaking into Russian bases to steal key cards, secrets plans and more? It’s nigh on impossible not to think of the shooter that nailed this formula back in 1997. In some ways it’s a little unfair to compare the work of Rare – one of the greatest studios the UK has ever produced – to the creation of a single indie developer, but even the 22-year-old GoldenEye 007 can still pull off the balance of applicable stealth rules, balanced weapon performance and player movement better than this.

Beyond Enemy Lines: Covert Operations is just a mess. A hot mess of old ideas poorly executed. While you can sprint without end, you’re forced to move your reticule with all the haste of a heavily-medicated octogenarian. Want to adjust that those settings? Well, let’s just say there aren’t any settings for you adjust to you’d better get used to aiming in slow-mo. Mercifully, there is an auto lock-on (which you can’t switch off, obviously) and you can still aim down your iron sights – kind of. In reality, the screen just zooms in a fraction and your gun never actually moves.

This is a game inspired by the classic days of Rainbow Six, Delta Force and SWAT. The open-ended nature of each map, the selection of weapons on offer and the ‘choice’ of how to approach each mission and its multiple objectives. But Beyond Enemy Lines: Covert Operations doesn’t possess any of the qualities that made these series so timeless. You can’t customise your loadout before a mission. Gun physics are so vague you can snipe enemies across the map with a pistol. And, if you’re far enough away, enemies being shot simply won’t move as it’s your proximity that activates their AI. Even recoil will systematically cause your aim to shift higher and higher with every shot, unless you’re aiming down your ‘sights’, in which there is no recoil.

Perhaps it’s possible to ‘control the recoil’ with a mouse, but there’s simply no support for this when you’re forced to use the analog sticks. There are no settings in place for motion controls either, but then again, there are no ‘settings’ in general so that shouldn’t be much of a surprise. There’s very little room for saves, either. Taking notes from forgotten tactical shooters such as Project IGI, you’ll need to learn enemy positions and use map knowledge to complete objectives with a minimum of confrontation.

The problem is when you combine a stealth system you can’t predict, a range of weapons that feel and perform in too similar a fashion and an aiming model that’s so slow you’ll never win a gunfight coming from anywhere other than directly in front of you, you’re left with a shooter that simply isn’t stable enough to warrant any form of tactics. Games such as Delta Force punished you for poor decision making, but the mechanics and physics it employed were solid. Mission failures were the product of human error, not gaming imperfection.

From a visual standpoint, Beyond Enemy Lines: Covert Operations pulls of the homage to early 2000s era PC shooters by looking as primitive as an early 2000s era PC shooter. Guns clip into the side of buildings while balaclavas clip on the faces of your enemies. Something as simple as blades of grass pop in on the ground in environments that would make early Farming Simulators hang their heads in shame. Draw distances are surprisingly decent, but the framerate is so choppy you’ll barely notice.

Conclusion

Beyond Enemy Lines: Covert Operations is an Early Access game that’s come out of the oven less than half-baked. The good intentions of the developer are clear to see in the open-ended nature of each map and the way you approach each objective in your way by opening locked doors and hacking computers rather than shooting your way into a facility, but none of the mechanics in place ever make these conditions feel reliable or rewarding. It’s a purely single-player experience that really needed more time to work out its considerable number of kinks before enlisting on the eShop.

Despite the fact its often working on the next entry in the eternal cultural phenomenon that is Pokémon, Game Freak every so often takes the time to cleanse its creative palette with something that doesn’t involve pocket-based monsters. The most recent of its side forays was Giga Wrecker, which smashed its way onto PC two years ago, and while it’s a world away from the top-down beast battling of Game Freak’s usual fare, this puzzle-platformer has a similar level of quality you’ll instantly appreciate.

Finally ported to consoles as Giga Wrecker Alt., this little open-ended 2D side-scroller has some grand ideas when it comes to puzzles and how you interact with the world around you. Everything centres around one Reika Rekkeiji. Following an invasion by an army of ravenous robots, young Reika is locked away in a cell and seemingly left for dead. That is until another equally young heroine blasts open her cell and shoots her. Now definitely left for dead, Reika is rescued by the snarky yet brilliant Doctor Kozuki, who uses the technology of Earth’s new robotic invaders to rebuild our leading lady with cybernetic implants.

So yes, it’s very Mega Man (with a sprinkling of 2D Castlevania), but the actual gameplay itself is more focused on puzzle solving than nails-hard combat. With her new metallic limbs, Reika can now smash her way through giant blocks, including smashing up and smashing down to access new areas. Destruction is physics-based, so columns of rock will often fall depending on how they’ve been struck, enabling you to create bridges across gaps early in the game. However, it’s not just about creating destruction, but using the results of your destructive abilities to solve conundrums and to aid you in combat. By pressing ‘ZR’ or ‘R’ you can ‘recall’ any nearby rubble to you to create a sphere of deadly detritus.

The larger your ball of rubble, the further it’ll reach. At first this’ll simply seem like a quick fix for a lack of ranged attacks, but soon you realise it’s ideal for turning destructible elements into shapes needed to solve a certain environmental puzzle. Need to reach a high platform? How about turning a high ledge above you into a slope by smashing the nearest section away? Or bashing a large haphazard block into a rudimentary series of steps? Most of the Giga Wrecker Alt.’s puzzles ultimately boil down to ‘reach this point so you can unlock this door’, but the fun of solving how to turn the environment into a solution often negates the predictable setup.

It’s easy to mess up – especially if you haven’t got the hang of Reika’s powerful punch and how best to use it at certain heights and distances – so most major puzzles come with a nearby tachyon point. The electromagnetic waves you use to recall rubble can be used to create a paradoxical time jump that basically resets the puzzle and restores all previously destroyed scenery. The only caveat is these ‘tachyon bursts’ remove any rubble you were carrying at the time. It’s also really easy to keep activating these points as you only need to push up on the analogue stick to activate them. They also reset all enemies, making retries that extra bit tricky.

The console port isn’t just a straight rehash of the PC version, either. Giga Wrecker Alt. comes with over 20 new levels to explore, a brand new ‘Iron Man’ hard mode for those thirsting for a little extra challenge and a new hint system in the form of your floating robot pal, Dölma. The latter is easily the most beneficial of the lot. Sure, lots of extra levels to play through is always welcome – especially for those who played the original – but considering how obtuse some of its grander puzzles can be, having Dölma there to assist in what a rubble formation should look like when it’s finished is a godsend. New players will really appreciate this new feature, while more experienced rubble-rousers will really get a kick out of having a higher difficulty mode to overcome.

Weirdly, Giga Wrecker Alt.’s weakest elements are its looks. A more retro anime aesthetic was clearly the intention Game Freak was going with, but in an era where similar titles have produced visual styles as striking as Dead Cells or Celeste, this sometimes ends up like something someone put together in Flash. It’s environments can also look really captivating at times, especially during certain boss battles, but the dichotomy between the two can be very jarring.

Conclusion

When it’s not giving the world more reasons to ‘Catch ‘Em All’, Game Freak continues to deliver interesting and unexpected forays into other genres. Much like Tembo the Badass Elephant before it, Giga Wrecker Alt. is a quirky left-turn that takes the exploration staples of a 2D Metroidvania and combines it with a destructible environment puzzle system for some creative and hugely rewarding puzzles. Combat is quite forgettable, but sucker-punching a boss with a giant ball can be ridiculous fun when you pull it off. Its looks might not be that memorable, but it’s still a worthy way to make a mess on Switch.

It’s pretty safe to say that we’ve been feeling rather hyped to give Cytus α a try ever since it was first announced for Switch. The game comes from Rayark, a Taiwanese indie developer which has already brought both VOEZ and Deemo to Switch in the last couple of years, following their rhythm-based footsteps right to the pearly gates of Nintendo’s storefront. With two great games like that already under Rayark’s belt, we were hopeful that this latest release would be well worth our time, too. So was it?

Well, in a word: yes. Cytus started life on mobile platforms back in 2012, before eventually making its way to PlayStation Vita the following year. The edition you’ll find on Switch, with the little ‘α’ attached to the name, includes more than 200 songs from the original release and some new ones that have been made specifically for it (you’ll find a decent mix of electronic tracks, pop, trance, and more waiting for you). The game’s publisher, Flyhigh Works, has described it as the “definitive edition” and we can certainly see why.

This small avalanche of tracks is initially presented to you in a single-player story mode. You’ll make your way through chapters, scoring as many points as you can on each song to unlock the next chapter in the list. You’ll also unlock data entries as you go which slowly piece together a story; accompanied by lovely pieces of art, these little snippets share a tale of robots living with human memories and the importance of the music you’re playing, but in all honesty, we usually just wanted to get right back to the action itself.

Speaking of the action, let’s explore the actual gameplay. As you might expect, being a rhythm game, Cytus α tasks you with successfully playing along to music. A black bar bounces between the top and bottom of the screen in time with the beat and pulsating circles begin to appear to represent the notes you need to hit. As the black bar passes through a note, the circle changes in appearance slightly, indicating that now is the time to give it a tap.

It’s a very different approach to input when compared to VOEZ and Deemo, but we have to say that it’s absolutely the best of the three. The notes can appear anywhere on the screen – so nothing like games such as Guitar Hero where different colours consistently reach you at the bottom – and you’ll find yourself attempting a crazy kind of finger ballet as they pop up all around you. Notes have different input requirements – such as a single tap, a longer hold, or sometimes a dragging action which can go in any direction across the screen – and it’s incredibly fun.

These actions can all be performed either by using the touchscreen in handheld mode, or with your Joy-Con should you prefer a traditional controller setup. If you use a controller, notes can be hit by pressing any of the face or directional buttons, and slides can be triggered with the shoulder buttons. We tested both control methods across a variety of songs and, for us at least, the touchscreen option wins hands down. There’s something particularly satisfying about dancing around the screen playing a musical version of whack-a-mole, and we found swapping between standard notes and slides a little too fiddly with a controller.

We actually struggled to get to grips with either mode at first – not realising that the notes were colour coded to let you know the best time to hit them – but as time went on, we really started to get in the zone and ‘feel’ each track. The hit points for each note are also pleasingly accurate and surprisingly forgiving, allowing a decent amount of room for error should you spot a note a little late.

On the easier side of things, you’ll likely find it to be a mostly relaxing experience, and as each and every song in the game comes in both easy and hard flavours, you could choose to play through the entire thing in this way. The harder difficulty is definitely where the most fun can be had in our eyes – tapping and sliding your way around the screen at about 150mph is immensely satisfying when you pull it off – but some of the tracks really aren’t for the faint-hearted. Any songs described as being level 7 or above (the scale ranges from 1 – 9) had us frantically pressing anywhere and everywhere in a desperate attempt to score any points at all. To master the hardest songs, you’ll need to memorise not only the song itself, but the tap, hold, and slide patterns presented to you at frightening speeds.

When you couple that need to learn each song thoroughly with the highscore-chasing nature of any rhythm game, you’ll find that there’s plenty of replayability here. A quick look at your status menu shows you how many songs you’ve cleared on each difficulty, how many times you’ve hit 100% of the notes, and how many times you’ve earned the ‘Million Master’ title for a song (awarded when you hit all of the notes with perfect timing). If you’re crazy enough to attempt getting the Million Master medal for every song, you’re going to be playing this one for a long time.

There’s actually even more of a reason to stick around, too, thanks to an online matchmaking feature. You can decide whether or not you’d like to face opponents online while playing through the story, or you can simply jump into online matches from the main menu at any time. These act like mini battles, where one to three players play through a song and compete in real time. The game runs perfectly well when connected to other users, but we did struggle to find other players for matches at times (this was on the game’s launch day, it should be said).

As you can probably tell, we’re pretty chuffed with the game as a whole, but there’s one little thing holding us back from insisting that everyone and their cat should buy it immediately: the price. Don’t get us wrong, this is an incredibly tight rhythm experience with a good amount of content, but we feel that Rayark has almost shot itself in the foot with its previous releases. Cytus α costs a full $49.99, with both VOEZ and Deemo being available for just a fraction of that price. Cytus is definitely the strongest of the bunch, but when you consider all of the free updates which have arrived in the other titles, boosting their song tallies and leaving Cytus’ online mode as the only real difference, it’s hard to truly recommend this new release over the others.

In terms of gameplay, Cytus is quite possibly the best rhythm game available on Switch. In terms of value for money, the lines are a little more blurred.

Conclusion

Cytus α is a wonderful take on the rhythm genre with a note layout which is really nicely suited to Nintendo Switch. Tapping and sliding your way around the handheld’s touchscreen is an absolute delight when you’re in full flow, and should more and more players start to fill up the online lobby, this could easily be considered one of the best rhythm games on the platform. The full retail asking price is a little hard to swallow when put in direct comparison to other, similar titles, but the quality is there if you don’t mind taking a harder hit to the wallet.