Category: Nintendo News

The Switch has been a bit of a sales sensation, leading to an inevitable glut of eShop releases ahead of Christmas. But while increased third-party support is never to be sniffed at, games like MUJO help no-one.

If you’ve been following smartphone games over the past several years, MUJO may well feel familiar to you; it was released onto iOS and Android in late 2014 to generally favourable reviews. The original was a very approachable and polished match-three puzzler with a cute Greek myth twist. You’re getting the same basic experience here.

MUJO is all about gathering together clumps of coloured blocks in a grid and touching the screen or pressing a button to make them disappear. Each colour feeds into a tussle that’s occurring between your trio of Greek gods and their rivals (think the Minotaur and Medusa). Red blocks initiate attacks, while the other colours help empower your Gods.

Before long you’ll encounter foes with thousands of hit points who need to be felled in just one or two almighty attacks. This is where your ability to gather together multiple red blocks into one high-value unit comes into play. By doing so, and then matching those souped-up blocks in kind, you can lay the smackdown on your opponent.

Stirring things up are the occasional boss character, often with a strict move limit, as well as bombs that threaten to wipe out your level-1,000 attack block. You’ll also encounter chests that, once matched or destroyed, grant you a random new Greek God to add to your roster. Each God has their own special abilities, such as being able to rearrange the grid or safely remove bombs, and you’re free to swap individual members out to put together the ideal team.

So far, so decent. What’s the problem here? We’ve already mentioned the most glaring issue: MUJO on Switch is the same as MUJO the mobile game. As in, exactly the same.

The developer has essentially ported this three-year-old mobile title onto Nintendo’s console with no thought of optimisation or enhancements. The game retains its portrait perspective on the landscape Switch display, leaving ugly great borders to the left and right side. 

You can press Y to zoom into the grid, but this feels like a fudge. Would it really have been so hard to shift the Gods and the rest of the UI elements to the sides?

Meanwhile the game’s touch-driven controls have been mapped scruffily to the Joy-Con buttons. Selecting blocks in the grid with the left stick isn’t so bad, but needing to scroll right down to use your God powers seems poorly thought through, as does needing to press two different buttons to activate a special ability.

You can use the Switch’s touchscreen more directly in handheld mode, but thanks to that un-optimised view it’s all too small and pokey to be truly effective.

All this is bad enough, and you’d probably stop at ‘incredibly lazy’ if that was the extent of MUJO’s crimes. Slapping a notable price tag on this completely un-enhanced game is tougher to swallow, while keeping the original free-to-play game’s energy system and related in-app purchases in place seems downright cynical.

There’s an energy system at play here that sees you ‘spending’ lightning bolts to remove bothersome individual blocks and shortcut the whole God-collecting mechanic. After a while you may find that you run out of these bolts, leaving you with a choice of waiting for the daily replenishment or paying real money.

Such a system arguably has a place in a free-to-play mobile game. We struggle to see how it has a place in a paid Nintendo Switch game – even a budget one.

It’s true that you don’t have to spend money to play MUJO. But the very fact that this legacy system remains in place is indicative of the lack of thought and effort that’s been put into this port.

Conclusion

MUJO is a decent casual puzzler with a pleasant aesthetic, but the total lack of effort made to bring the game in line with its new platform is deeply disappointing. The game’s poorly optimised user interface and ill-fitting legacy in-app purchase system smack of a rush job.

We’ve got no problem with developers bringing mobile games across to Switch. This is a portable system that’s built on mobile technology, and there are plenty of top mobile games out there that would make for a good fit with just a little effort. MUJO, however, is a deeply lazy and cynical port.

Plague Road is a game that defies the constrictions of definition. It amalgamates so many disparate elements that it feels both familiar and refreshing. Set in a world ravaged by an indelible scourge, you play as the Doctor, a beak-masked hero who left the disease-ridden city and is now trying to make their way back to their home, even if it’s been ravaged by fate.

The game tasks you with working your way through various and randomly generated areas in order to reach your destination. The world of Plague Road is unforgiving; at the beginning of the game the Doctor is summarily wiped out but saved by a traveling merchant and taken to safety at an abandoned farm. Thus begins the gameplay loop Plague Road builds itself upon: you go out into the world, pushing your way through oppression to find survivors of the apocalypse that are willing to aid you, thus making the Doctor stronger and stronger until he can push on into new zones. These survivors can be used in one of two ways: you can recruit them into your party as you venture forth, or you can “retire” them into various dilapidated buildings on your farm that will raise meters, which then strengthen the Doctor with stat boosts or skills.

As you push onward in Plague Road you’ll be greeted by enemies in the form of bandits, wildlife, mystical beings and clockwork machines. When they reach you, a grid turn-based battle begins. Although there are occasionally obstacles on each map, most fights are duked out based on the type and range your attacks have, the amount of stamina it takes to execute them and the distance each party member can move. Although there is a hefty variety of characters to choose from, they repeat often and are only delineated by the barest of statistics. You’ll often find yourself favouring certain types and sending the repeats to build up your base.

The presentation lends itself to the desolate world the Doctor finds himself in. Although most areas are elongated hallways with connections to new zones, they are creepy in an interesting way. Skeletons hang from swaying trees, cobblestone streets are punctuated by a red dusk and piled up corpses drive home that sense of destruction. Likewise the sound effects are stark and gruesome against a solemn and windy soundtrack. The ambience is grim, and Plague Road is intriguing because of it.

However, while elements like rescuing survivors to build your party and base, a strategic-minded battle system and roguelike tendencies sound like the perfect formula, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. Your menagerie of party members are useful, but not endearing. While there are visible improvements to the buildings in your abode, they don’t feel like anything more than the metrics of leveling up they provide. The lack of a wide variety of enemies married with the regularity of finding combat also dulls the experience a little. It feels like the developers just missed the mark in terms of what they were trying to achieve, and that’s a pity.

Conclusion

Plague Road is a valiant attempt at combining divergent concepts into a cohesive and interesting package. But as interesting as it may be to make the first roguelike base-building strategy RPG, it’s missing a layer of depth to drive it beyond curiosity into the realm of compulsory design. There’s plenty to like here, and if you’re in the mood for a morose adventure down a bleak path to a ruined world this may be for you. If you’re just looking to casually save the world from an outbreak, however, you may want to think carefully.