Category: Nintendo News

When we first reviewed VVVVVV for the 3DS way back in 2010, we praised it for its ZX Spectrum / Commodore 64-style graphics, along with its simple and intuitive gravity-shifting mechanics. Not much has changed about VVVVVV in the intervening years, but truly, we don’t mind. 

If you haven’t tried VVVVVV before it’s a rather simplistic game. You need to find all the members of your crew in a foreign and strange dimension, and in order to do so you’ll need to traverse pits, spikes and avoid native wildlife by shifting gravity around you. The controls consist of the D-Pad for movement and a sole button, any of them, for controlling gravity for your character.

You have to rescue your six crew members and guide them to a teleporter to return them to your ship, which has (of course) crash landed. To find them you’ll need to gravity shift your way through platforming challenges that require a steady hand and quick reflexes. Even the most seasoned of veterans will die in VVVVVV. A lot. Every time you die you’ll start back at the last checkpoint you cleared, and they are plentiful. 

The chiptune soundtrack is simple but enjoyable, much like the game’s visuals.  Aside from rescuing your comrades, there are also a handful of collectibles to find littered throughout the world. The map – which can be accessed with a tap of the R button – isn’t particularly helpful in finding these, but will at least help you keep track of where you’re going, as well as where you’ve been. 

Both collectibles and comrades are trapped behind what can sometimes be downright vicious platforming. You’ll die plenty, but you never feel like you’re being punished. There’s no loading or delay to come back thanks to the simplistic presentation, and that keeps up a lovely sense of momentum and a ‘one-more-try’ mentality.

As with the 3DS port, completing the main adventure opens up a series of additional modes, including a No Death mode for those with nerves of steel and reflexes to match. You can also share the madness in local multiplayer in this Switch iteration, with some crazy action possible once a couple of players grab a Joy-Con each.

Conclusion

VVVVVV feels every bit as fresh on the Switch in 2017 as it did on the 3DS in 2010; if you didn’t try it back then you should definitely pick it up now. If you did, now may nevertheless be a good time to revisit. Mutliplayer makes the Switch version even more interesting, and this is a game that still serves up an intense and enjoyable challenge. VVVVVV is a fantastic value and a great addition to the Switch library.

Battle Chef Brigade is something of an oddity. Part cooking game, part action RPG, it’s hard to explain without sounding like you’re a bit off. Unless, of course, you’re a fan of anime, in which case you’ll feel at home. Even if you aren’t, however, there’s plenty to love.

Battle Chef Brigade answers a question many RPG fans have asked over the years, “Why don’t they eat the monsters?” In this world, not only are monsters served up for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but those that hunt, cook and serve them are revered as heroes by the populace. 

You play as Mina Han, a talented warrior and chef in a sleepy village who runs away from home to join the brigade. Your first days are spent being taught the ins and outs of hunting and cooking. The tutorial is masterfully done, explaining what would normally be a tricky concept in a way that feels natural.

As we mentioned before, there are two core elements to the game: hunting and cooking. Hunting begins the minute you set foot outside the kitchen and Mina is quick and deadly, wielding two daggers. Her skillset starts out with a few basic moves, but quickly expands as you progress through the story. Before long you’ll be using magic and chaining attacks together without your feet touching the ground. 

Back in the kitchen, Battle Chef Brigade becomes a puzzle game. Each item in your pantry is reduced to a number of flavour gems. These gems need to be rotated into lines or stacks of three to evolve. The goal is to get the most powerful flavour gems you can into your dish, thus increasing its overall score. The higher the score, the more the person tasting the dish will enjoy it. There are three types of flavour gem initially: fire, earth and water.

Once you’ve cleared the tutorial you’ll be thrust into battle against other chefs, making cooking more complex. From this point forward, the game becomes quite a lot like Iron Chef, the popular TV show. The chairman of the brigade will choose a theme ingredient, which can be a piece of fruit, a vegetable or a monster. In addition to needing to cook with the ingredients chosen by the chairman, you’ll also need to consider the preferences of the judge of the competition and select ingredients accordingly. Giving a judge a high-level dish that doesn’t suit their palate will knock off major points and give your opponent the win. 

Everything in Battle Chef Brigade is drawn by hand, and it’s gorgeous; the whole game has a pencil-sketch feel to it. Animation feels like a bit of a throwback to the SNES era, as characters have a small number of reactions that are used frequently throughout cutscenes and in battle. Environments are also static, with no movement to them whatsoever. We were never bothered by this, but more fluid animation certainly would not have hurt.

From chapter two (of six) onward, you’ll begin to unlock items for use in your loadout, which is critically important. You start off with some items that increase your health and mana, but can purchase additional supplies at the shop to make your life a bit easier, both on the battlefield and in the kitchen. Some items will make it easier to combine certain flavour gems, while others will allow you to remove things you don’t want from your recipes. Of course, each item comes with a cost, and there are odd jobs you can do, such as working at a restaurant or hunting specific quarry. Each of these jobs comes with a reward all its own as well. Some are just coin, but occasionally you can learn a new technique that can help you.

As you progress through the story the difficulty will ratchet up. Some challenges will see you working with poisonous ingredients, requiring you to exercise caution when rotating flavour gems lest you poison all the food, while others will have you prepare two or even three dishes for judges in a hurry. Every match has a time limit which varies based on the number of dishes you’re expected to produce. The story took us somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15 hours to complete, but once you get the hang of the game it’s easy to go much faster than that.

Aside from the main story there’s also a daily cooking challenge which lets you choose between the main protagonist – Mina – and another character you meet early on in the story. You’re given a randomized set of equipment and can score your dish against your friends in the leaderboards. This is our favourite mode to play on the Switch as it lends itself well to portable play. This is the only way you’ll interact with other players in Battle Chef Brigade, but it’s fun to boast to your friends.

Conclusion

Battle Chef Brigade is the first game of its kind, a rarity in this day and age. Everything about it is fresh and original, from its story to the handrawn graphics, to the brilliant voice acting. The combination of fast-paced action, RPG-style gear collecting and puzzle elements wrapped into a game about cooking is something that sounds absurd but works incredibly well.

Like a well-made dish, each element of Battle Chef Brigade’s gameplay is perfectly prepared. You could separate out each of the three main components of this game and have the foundation for something intriguing on its own, but it’s the combination of them that forms something truly memorable. Whether you think you’d like this or not, we recommend at least giving it a look. Battle Chef Brigade is a must-play for all Switch owners.

If you haven’t heard of the original Beat Sports, don’t worry – it was something of a sleeper hit. When the Apple TV first launched back in 2015, developer Harmonix was chosen to kickstart the device as a gaming platform with its rhythm-based sports compilation. From Rock Band to space sports it was a bit of a departure, but the release was still praised for its cutesy charm and addictive gameplay. Flash forward to the present day and Beat Sports is back – souped up and ready to compete in the big leagues.

Super Beat Sports is a Switch-exclusive remake of that original title, comprised of five separate mini games based around different sports, one of which is entirely new for this version. Stepping into the shoes of a nameless chibi humanoid, you’re whisked off to a distant planet where a group of music-loving aliens have tried to replicate human sporting events, but end up turning everything into variations on a kind of musical baseball. This setup, while ultimately pretty irrelevant, provides a colourful backdrop for a plethora of different activities, and the bug-eyed beasties themselves are lovably fleshed out with fun artwork and cute flavour text during loading screens. From the moment the opening screen bursts into a joyous exclamation of the game’s title, it’s clear that you’re in for a good time. 

Fans of the Rhythm Heaven series will feel right at home due to the game’s extremely simplistic control scheme, which is largely the same across all five events. Though they’re all distinct from one another in a number of ways, nearly every one of the game modes can essentially be described as whalloping a ball in time with the music. Each true sporting champion must have a keen ear for disco beats and synth tunes you see, but that usually comes down to just hitting ‘A’ at the right moment. One of the game’s main selling points is how easy this premise is to dive right into, but are all sports created equal?

Whacky Bat is the first of five options on the main menu, and is an excellent starting point for any potential athletes looking to test their reflexes. It’s a simple game of repetition played across a number of lanes, as aliens drop down and begin a rally by pitching a ball for you to hit back. Everything is set to the beat of a song, so you’ll need to match their pace in order to hop across the playing field, time your swings, and keep those aliens on their toes…or tentacles. Different creatures throw at different speeds, so you’ll need to keep on top of things as later levels mix things up with complicated combos. Again, it’s as simple as hitting ‘A’ and moving across lanes with either the control stick as a standard, or the shoulder buttons to jump two at a time.

Net Ball is a little more frantic, pitting the player against a team of aliens who throw a single ball around much faster, even passing amongst themselves at times. While Whacky Bat was all about repeating a rhythm, Net Ball is more about involving yourself in it by predicting an ongoing pattern. It’s faster and twitchier, which is unfortunately not the case with Gobble Golf – perhaps the weakest of the five games on offer. This plays out a bit like Simon Says, where little blobby aliens chirp out a pattern across three platforms, prompting the player to mirror their song by hitting golf balls into their hungry gobs. The quicker you do it, and the less mistakes you make, the more points you’ll rack up by the end. This just doesn’t have the same energy as the other sports on offer, perhaps relying too heavily on simplistic tunes to keep our interest for more than a few stages.

It’s worth mentioning now that all of these games can be played in either single-player or two-player modes, and with a lack of any real ‘campaign’, having a co-op partner along for the ride can definitely liven things up. Each sport has a couple dozen different levels to unlock, and performing well by stringing together combos will earn you a medal at the end of each stage. Racking up points also earns you a variety of cosmetic items for your character, such as different outfits or designs for what we can only assume is called your super special alien whack-stick™. Having spent far too many hours in the past strumming plastic instruments and taking on the role of an Elite Beat Agent, we were worried upon finding the initial difficulty setting to be far too slow-paced. Thankfully Harmonix has catered for this, and it’s possible to toggle Pro Mode within any sport’s level select screen. If you have previous experience with rhythm-based games of any kind then this offers a welcome challenge by immediately kicking things up a notch in terms of speed and variety, and we ended up playing exclusively under this difficulty setting. 

The final two games are a real highlight, focusing more so on the multiplayer aspect with support for up to four players in total. Buddy Ball is an elimination-style competition, where players take it in turns to hit a ball towards an alien of their choice, trying to keep the beat while throwing off the next player in line. If you miss a beat then you lose a life until eventually there’s only one musician standing. The key is to be as unpredictable as possible, which is emphasised by the fact that aliens will be knocked out if you overuse them, turning them into dangerous bombs or other items. It’s like a more vicious take on Whacky Bat, and when it’s down to just two players things can get pretty intense.

As a grand finale, Super Beat Sports features one entirely new game mode that’s unique to this version, and we think that the best has been saved for last. Rhythm Racket is like an insane mix between Pong, Crossfire, Pinball, and a neon nightmare where you fire a ball around an ever-changing arena to try and score inside your opponent’s goal. It’s got the most elaborate setup too, with a full tutorial to explain some of the mechanics before you even get started. There are barriers to break down, aliens to control and bonus events to activate, but it’s never enough to overwhelm you. As frantic as it is, the core concept is very familiar – you can move your paddle back and forth between your goal posts, and time your hits to shoot further – meaning that anyone can just grab a Joy-Con and make things even more hectic. With a full four players this is brilliant fun, and perhaps most impressively, each impact still manages to string notes together into a cohesive song as you play.

Speaking of the game’s soundtrack, there are a slew of original music tracks for each of the different modes, all with an electronic, spacey kind of style. We never felt like there were any duds in the selection, but nothing really stood out to us during our time either. The aliens hum along with certain beats, some songs are faster or slower, and it all pretty much feels fit for purpose, even if you might not remember any of the tunes once you step away. The best musical moments come organically, usually as a result of a frenzied volley in Rhythm Racket.

With all of this fast-paced bopping going on, it’s good to know that Super Beat Sports runs at 60fps whether in docked or handheld mode, and we didn’t notice any dips in this performance. Loading is more of an issue, with even simple restarts taking slightly too long to warrant the score-chasing mentality that’s encouraged. The ‘pick up and play’ element is hindered somewhat by this, and the general repetition of gameplay becomes more noticeable when you’re left waiting on the next level to load, knowing that it’s going to look the exact same as the last ten. 

Thanks to Pro Mode, players of all skill levels will find hours of gameplay here even when going solo, but keep in mind that there isn’t a lot of variety between the three main sports. Rhythm Racket and Buddy Ball can be played with bots, but are far far superior with an actual group of friends, and lack the score-based infrastructure of Whacky Bat for example. Since there isn’t an online option, if you aren’t going to be able to try out the local multiplayer then a large part of the game’s appeal is lost, so do keep that in mind. Also worth mentioning; playing a game like this outside or on the move without headphones isn’t really ideal given how important sound is to the experience, though many of the aliens do give visual cues to help alleviate this somewhat. It just feels as though the musical concept is at odds with the spontaneous multiplayer sessions made possible by the Switch itself, at least when you’re using just the one console. 

All of this is wrapped up in a bright veneer of cartoony visuals that do the job, but feel noticeably dated when blown up onto the TV. That being said, the interface is nice and clean, working perfectly well to convey your performance and provide those visual cues on alien maneuvers. There are really charming touches too; such as the fact that your character will cheer and clap for competitors when they win, rather than stomp their foot and mutter under their breath, Wario-style. It’s a friendly, fun atmosphere that just fills our old, withered hearts with joy. Almost.

Conclusion

Super Beat Sports casts the player into a world ruled over by inhuman alien lifeforms, obsessed with physical, brutal gladiatorial events under the oppressive droning of a harsh synthetic rhythm, without any explanation of why or how things have come to be this way. Aside from all that though, actually it’s really rather cute, the games are fun for newcomers or veterans alike, and the local multiplayer options are top-notch. While score-chasers will find plenty of medals to earn for perfect performances, casual play will end up being pretty repetitious, especially with the lengthy load times. Because of this, even though it’s broken up into bite-sized chunks it isn’t always an ideal single player experience. We’d still recommend it however, especially at a budget price, so if you’re looking for a fun party game to try out then assemble your crew and go whack some spaceballs!

When it comes to video game expectations, context really is king. As the first thing resembling a ‘proper’ racing game on Switch, Gear.Club Unlimited has a certain amount of goodwill stored up for it.

Conversely, Gear.Club’s mobile past means that racing fans will be watching with an unusually critical eye. It initially launched last year as a freemium iOS and Android racer, where it received a very warm welcome. Of course, the words ‘freemium’ and ‘mobile’ don’t win you any points with die-hard console gamers. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Gear.Club has both little to prove and everything to prove, then. So let’s just start with the basics: is it a good racing game?

It’s not bad at all, but expectations need to be reined in. If you’ve skimmed over the screenshots and the marketing blurb for Gear.Club you might be fooled into thinking that this is a true racing simulator in the mould of Gran Turismo or Forza. It isn’t.

Rather, this is an arcade racer with real cars, an approximation of authentic handling, and a few tweakable performance settings. It’s a boy racer hatchback with the silly spoiler taken off and a smart black paint job.

The handling is tight and grippy across the game’s predominantly short, snappy, tarmac courses, with the odd slippery off road excursion. It generally hits an accessible middle ground between Mario Kart and Gran Turismo, though obviously weighted towards the latter.

That being said, the lack of analogue triggers on the Switch meant that we found ourselves reverting to the face buttons for acceleration and braking, calling to mind Nintendo’s madcap kart racer. Fortunately there are no blue shells in sight.

Controls aside, once you’ve turned all the racing aids off (essential if you want to attain any kind of convincing racing sensation or challenge) Gear.Club Unlimited largely follows the principles of real racing. You’ll make swifter and tidier progress if you brake early for the tighter corners, steer in decisively, and stamp on the gas once your car is pointed in the right direction.

There are rally stages here too, but we didn’t find that this adjusted our approach too radically beyond a little more caution when re-engaging the throttle. This isn’t the kind of pure arcade racer where you spend most of your time with your back-end out, and the provision of a specific rally modification system went conspicuously underused.

While Gear.Club Unlimited’s handling is solid, the AI opposition isn’t particularly convincing. They all tend to line up politely ahead of corners, braking early rather than jostling for position and leaving gaping holes for you to nip into. Taking a slightly different line and applying the brakes a little later will see you taking multiple places without much effort. You can bump up the difficulty to Hard, but this doesn’t seem to change the basic sheeplike behaviour of your opponents – it just makes their cars faster. Given that it’s a simple matter to put your own car into the garage and supercharge it with a few upgrade purchases, overcoming this spike isn’t too much of a bind.

Indeed, the whole garage system feels like a curious leftover. There’s an elaborate mixture of upgrade stations that you can purchase for enhancing several key elements of your car, from a tire and brake station to a wind tunnel and a couple of cosmetic stations. All of these must be slotted into a limited garage space, which can be expanded over time.

Even without knowledge of Gear.Club’s past, it would be glaringly obvious that this was all constructed with a free-to-play system in mind. While the virtual currency flows far more freely in this premium version, however, we can’t help thinking that it would have been better to scrap the convoluted upgrade system and install a streamlined alternative in its place.

As it stands, upgrading your car feels both arbitrary and fiddly. Meanwhile, a UI that sees you moving a cursor to navigate a scrolling map feels like another vestigial mobile limb that should ideally have been lopped off.

One element that has been excised is the damage system, and it’s arguably to the game’s detriment. We can understand that waiting to have your expensive car fixed in between races wouldn’t have sat well in a premium game, but removing damage from the equation altogether feels counterproductive in a game with sim-shaped aspirations.

It pushes the dynamics of each and every race into an even more arcadey direction. Collisions are virtually penalty free here, barring a momentary loss of straight line speed and an achievement system that only meekly encourages clean racing.

Any lingering misapprehension that this is the Switch’s first out and out racing sim is dispelled by the presence of an unlimited rewind facility, which lets you roll back any mistakes you make with a press of the ‘X’ button. It’s neatly implemented, but feels a bit like a cheat button.

Once you’ve accepted that Gear.Club is not the racing sim you might have been hoping for, there’s plenty of fun to be had. Races whiz by at a snappy rate, with many lasting just a minute, and they vary between multi-car scraps and time trial dashes. In many ways it’s the ideal racing game for the Switch as a handheld console, and is more amenable to being whipped out for a few minutes at a time than even Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

You’ll find yourself unlocking new racing territories, car categories and dealerships at a consistently snappy rate, while you’ll be able to purchase some of the tastier hardware on offer in no time at all. The fun definitely picks up once you start accessing (and enhancing) the more exotic hardware, too.

Suddenly the game’s plentiful sweeping curves become a good deal more hair-raising, and your use of both throttle and brake needs to be more deft. You’ll find noticeable range in the handling here, too, from the twitchy go-kart precision of a Lotus Elise to the hefty balance of a Bentley Continental GT.

There’s also a provision for multiplayer in Gear.Club Unlimited, though that doesn’t include online races. Rather, you’ll have to console yourself with local split screen for up to four players and a competitive daily online ghost mode. On the plus side, the split screen multiplayer runs at a solid 30fps and can be pretty entertaining.

Technically Gear.Club Unlimited is a solid runner, if a little plain. The car models are all detailed and sufficiently shiny, while the action moves smoothly even with a dozen or so cars on screen at once. But there are also some ugly background textures, like the lakes and buildings of some of the European stages. There were also a few unusual sound bugs in our pre-release build, but these will hopefully be eradicated in the promised day one patch.

Conclusion

Gear.Club Unlimited is a highly entertaining racing game that sits firmly at the casual end of the realistic racer spectrum. It can be a thrillingly immediate experience, particularly on the go, where you can blast through one of its sweeping courses in just a minute or so.

Switch owners hoping for a Gran Turismo or a Forza to call their own will have to wait a little longer, however. What was a commendably rounded console-like racer on mobile seems just a little bit lightweight on Switch, while a few ill-fitting parts have survived the console rebuild.