Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the SwitchArcade Round-Up for August 5th, 2019. Not a whole lot of news over the weekend worth reporting, so the bulk of today’s feature is built around three reviews. Beyond that, we’ve got all the new sales and ending sales for you to check out, and a little bit of news for an upcoming release. There are more reviews coming soon, but one guy can only do so much in a day, friends. Let’s have a look!
News
‘SEGA AGES Columns 2’ Hitting Japan This Week
While releases have been more sporadic in the rest of the world, SEGA and M2 have been keeping to a pretty tight monthly schedule for SEGA AGES releases in Japan. Columns 2 is the first one to break that pattern in a while, but it didn’t miss July by too much. The game will be launching in Japan this Thursday, and it will most likely follow the pattern of all SEGA AGES releases by offering full English support. It’s quite a deluxe edition and even goes so far as to include a slightly limited version of the original game. Great news for all those Columns fans out there, no doubt. As usual, we don’t know exactly when this one is coming West, but it’s probably best to plan for the worst and assume it will be a couple months.
Reviews
Fire Emblem: Three Houses ($59.99)
Regular readers may know that I’m something of a Fire Emblem nut. I’ve been gobbling up new releases in the series since before they were even getting localized, and while I have my opinions about the various directions the franchise has gone in over the 25+ years it has been around, I still look forward to each and every new game like it’s Christmas. I was especially excited for Fire Emblem: Three Houses for a lot of reasons, and I’m happy to say that for the most part it has lived up to my expectations. There are some minor technical issues and there are certainly some pacing issues plaguing the game on the whole, but it’s an impressive and bold step for a franchise that often runs into trouble when it tries to make big changes.
There were a lot of good signs for this game’s success. Chief among them is that Fire Emblem is now a premiere brand for Nintendo, a situation that nobody could have predicted ten short years ago. There’s big money in those hills, and Nintendo now knows it, which means the developers have likely had a lot more rope to work with in the last few installments. But while Fates had to be rushed to strike while the iron was hot and Echoes had the air of the late-generation stop-gap release that it was hanging about it, Three Houses has had a chance to breathe. Nintendo even let the team delay it a few months to give it a little more polish. They even brought in a co-developer: Koei, a bunch who certainly know a thing or two about tactical strategy games.
After the surprise success of Fire Emblem: Awakening, there was probably a feeling at developer Intelligent Systems that they had to adhere to the particulars of that title when making a follow-up. I can understand it. But the children characters, who felt like a natural part of the plot of Awakening, came off as embarrassingly shoe-horned in for Fates. Fates also struggled with its ambitious goal of trying to tell a coherent story from multiple viewpoints. Being a remake, Echoes couldn’t wander too far away from its source, but the reception to the game had to give Intelligent Systems some pause.
For Three Houses, the developer has wisely booted out the idea of baby-making. I’m sure we’ll see it again in future games where it fits, but it’s just too hard to work that kind of thing into a story on a regular basis to make it a core part of the Fire Emblem experience. We do get our fair share of youth drama, however, as the game sets you up as a professor at a monastery just after you start. And the multiple-perspective story-telling makes a return as well, albeit in a less expensive and far more coherent fashion. Like the Hogwarts Academy that probably provided a fair bit of inspiration for the setting of this game, there are multiple houses at the monastery, and you’ll be taking charge of one of them. Each has its own motley crew of students that will be in your charge, and you can woo many of the others to join your group when you meet certain conditions.
It works a lot better here than it did in Fates. The quality of the plot is better, and the writing is a lot less forced than it often felt in that game. There’s value in playing through the game multiple times just to get a full grasp of the story and the setting, but if you only choose to play through once, it doesn’t feel incomplete in the same way Fates did under similar conditions. Without having to focus on marriages and kids, character relationships come off a lot more natural. While I had been a bit concerned about the dynamics between a teacher character and their students, Three Houses handles it well. It’s hard not to get attached to all of these broken little units as you guide them through their education, and when certain things go down (and oh my, do they go down), it can be very distressing. And that’s a good thing.
What is less good is just how often the game can feel like it’s padding itself out. There’s a lot of wasted time and bloat involved in this game, akin to something like Persona rather than the probably-too-streamlined approach this series is generally known for. It sometimes feels like you spend just as many hours out of battles as you do in them. For some people, that’s going to be a positive. Three Houses certainly feels more like a JRPG with tactical turn-based battles rather than a straight example of the strategy RPG genre, so if that’s what you were hoping for, the game generally delivers. There are lots of chances to explore, talk to people, engage in sub-quests and mini-games, and so on. Personally, I feel like the game has tilted a little too far in that direction, but I’m also the sort that feels that recent Persona games could be half as long and would be twice as good for it.
Once you get to the battles, things are a lot more familiar than you might have expected based on pre-release information. The much ballyhooed battalions amount to little more than a stat bonus and the occasional extra special move. Things have certainly picked up visually, but you’ll be doing more or less the same things the same way you were in prior Fire Emblem games. The weapons triangle has been removed, so more focus is placed on individual characters and their moves. Weapons can once again break, however, and if you put extra strain on them by using lots of special attacks, they’ll break sooner. Magic skills have a limited number of uses per battle, but they automatically restore afterwards, which I feel is a nice compromise. In general, I feel like the battles in this game are quite well-designed and will likely appeal more to some players who found the last couple of games wanting in that regard.
As in other recent releases in the series, Fire Emblem: Three Houses allows players to choose a difficulty level and whether or not they want to have permadeath enabled. There’s one more new gimmick available for players who are struggling, too. You can now turn back the time a limited number of times in each battle to change a character’s move, just in case you really mess things up. I didn’t use it much, but it’s a good mechanic that has enough limits placed on it that players can’t completely rely on it. The class system has also been changed, allowing for more flexibility without getting too complicated or erasing character individuality.
Beyond the pacing issues, the other quibbles I have are relatively minor. The text size is stupidly small, making it really hard to read some things when you’re playing in handheld mode. The framerate sometimes takes a dive in certain areas and situations, which is a little surprising given that the game doesn’t look like it should be pushing the hardware. The animations for some of the attacks come off a little unimpressive compared to previous games, I suppose. But that’s really just looking for things to complain about. On the whole, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a humongous adventure that tries to and largely succeeds at uniting its own divided fandom houses. While it’s a bit slow in places and feels a little rough in others, the game dreamed big and did a pretty good job overall in realizing its ambitions.
SwitchArcade Score: 4.5/5
Swaps and Traps ($8.99)
Swaps and Traps doesn’t exactly put its best foot forward. The start of the game feels like another middling super-hard platformer. Jump your guy around, grab the keys, then head to the exit. We’ve done this a million times before, and we’ll be doing it a million more times in the future. After a few levels, however, it starts rolling out its core gimmick, and it is definitely something. From that point on, Swaps and Traps gradually turns up the heat all the way up to the end, constantly keeping you on your toes. Maintaining that pace is really something, because this game has over one hundred levels.
You play as an extremely plain hero named Mike, who wears a shirt with an ‘M’ on it in case he forgets his first initial. His nemesis is The Divider, who looks silly but actually has a nefarious power up his sleeve. He can chop up pieces of each level and swap them around, which may seem like a minor problem until you realize that you still interact with those spaces as though they were in their original spots. Take a step into one of these swapped zones and suddenly you’ll find yourself on another part of the screen. At first, it’s a mild annoyance. The traps aren’t so deadly, and who cares if two big chunks of the screen are swapped around?
But then, the traps get nastier. The levels get more intricate. Multiple sections get swapped instead of just two of them. Some of the sections are rotated, making it really hard to gauge where you’re going to land if you jump into or out of a swapped zone. And the only thing you have to help you make sense of any of this is a rough picture of the stage in its unswapped form that you can call up by hitting a button. It’s amazing how such a simple gimmick can cook your brain with the slightest of twists. And it absolutely makes what would otherwise be a relatively ordinary, solid-but-not-spectacular platformer into something worth paying attention to.
The controls are simple and spot-on, which helps quite a bit when things get hot. Restarts after death are instant, and the game records your time for each successful run so you can try to best the staff’s times and, eventually, your own. The Divider makes cheeky little comments while you play, mostly when you die or when he makes his swaps after you grab the keys. He can get a tiny bit annoying, but it certainly lends a little bit of character to a game whose largest weak point is its somewhat generic presentation.
Swaps and Traps is a really tough game, so it’s not going to be for everyone. But if you relish a good, tough platformer and are looking for something that puts a proper twist on the familiar concept, Swaps and Traps will give you what you’re looking for and then some. You get a lot of game for your buck, and the quality and overall pace of the journey is excellent. I think its somewhat plain appearance is going to lead to a lot of people passing over it without giving it a proper look. That would be a shame because it really is a clever, enjoyably aggravating, well-designed little romp.
SwitchArcade Score: 4/5
Catch a Duck ($4.99)
I was pleasantly surprised by Catch a Duck. You play as a fox who has to catch a duck on each stage. Presumably to eat? I don’t know. It sure doesn’t look good for the duck in any case. The game itself is a top-down action-puzzler with an emphasis on staying out of sight and reach of the various dangers scattered around each map. Not too fancy, but it works. The game’s art style and tone are charming enough, and there are enough gimmicks to keep things fresh for the whole journey.
Each map sees you trying to find and then catch the duck. Sometimes the duck is easily visible. Other times you might have to rustle bushes to flush it out. Getting to wherever the duck may be generally involves making your way around the map a bit, and that’s where things can get risky. Wolves, bears, hunters, and more are waiting out there to do to you what you’re trying to do to the duck, and when they start working together it takes delicate footwork and careful use of resources like hiding spots and traps to outsmart them. Just make sure you don’t bumble into any of those traps yourself.
Beyond catching the duck, each stage offers up several other ways to rack up a good score. Defeating enemy animals, catching rabbits, and collecting stars all boost your score, and in the latter’s case are the sole factor involved in getting a three-star ranking. Everyone wants a three-star ranking, don’t they? Indeed, much of the challenge of the game is wrapped up in collecting those stars, with the path to the duck being the bare minimum needed to progress. The rest of the challenge of the game comes from not stepping in the wrong direction because this grid-based game only lets you use the joystick for movement for whatever reason.
Aside from not letting me use the directional buttons/pad to move, this game really just has one big problem: it’s too short. You get just 20 standard levels, each of which takes just a couple of minutes at most to clear. By collecting stars, you can unlock an additional 5 bonus levels that are timed score challenges. Getting three stars on all of the levels might take a little while longer, but you shouldn’t expect to get much more than an hour or so out of Catch a Duck. Given the type of game it is, replay value isn’t its strong point, either. It’s not a bad deal for the price, but it definitely feels like it finishes before it properly explores the concepts it puts forward.
SwitchArcade Score: 3.5/5
New Releases
Plague Inc: Evolved ($14.99)
SwitchArcade Highlight!
Another game that should be very, very familiar to mobile gaming fans. This is essentially the same game as the one that has enchanted mobile gaming fans for years. Your goal is to create a disease so deadly that it wipes out all of humanity before they manage to cure it. You pick a country to start in and use the mutation points you gather to make your virus more infectious, deadly, and resistant. Multiple difficulty modes are available, and there are plenty of scenarios to play that add extra factors to the challenge. You can also create your own scenario if you like. The price may seem a bit high but this version includes a bunch of stuff you would have had to pay extra for in the mobile original. I’ve got a review of this one on the way, so I’ll leave it there for now.
Our Flick Erasers ($12.96)
SwitchArcade Highlight!
Um, well, I think I can say with some confidence that if you’ve been holding out for the ultimate game for eraser aficionados, your rubber ship has come in. Like, I’m kind of in awe at how much SAT-BOX has packed into this game. There are tons of modes here, and they all involve flicking erasers around on desktops one way or another. Have eraser battles against other players. Unite warring-states era Japan one eraser battle at a time. Use pencils, tape, and other accessories to kit out your eraser. Complete specific challenges that will test your eraser-flicking prowess. Win coins and exchange them in the mysterious classroom to unlock more erasers. There are over 300 erasers to collect in total. Up to four players can join in for local multiplayer on some of these modes, too. What can I say? Japanese kids love erasers, and this is an amazing celebration of that particular sub-culture.
Swallow Up ($7.99)
Hmmm. This seems like a really, really thin game. I guess you move the ball around and suck up all the blocks in each level? It’s supposed to be relaxing, and I suppose from a certain angle it is, but it comes off like a very cheap swing at the Katari Damacy/Donut County idea. Which is fine I suppose, but it doesn’t take too many more dollars to get you one of those two games, both of which offer considerably more in terms of bells and whistles than this does. It supports both touch and button controls, at least. There are also seems to be quite a decent number of levels to it. I mean, it doesn’t look awful or anything. But it does look a lot like something you could download for free on your mobile device if you ventured a couple dozen pages down a set of App Store search results.
Wreckin’ Ball Adventure ($4.99)
This seems like it could be a nice pick-up for the price. You control a little ball-shaped robot that has to roll, jump, and swing its way through 60 different levels. You can play by yourself or with up to three other players in local co-op. There are some physics puzzles along the way that should provide a bit of unpredictable fun, and plenty of things to collect. Once you’ve exhausted the story content, you can head on over the endless mode where your goal is to survive as long as you can. Seems like a good choice for people who have friends over for gaming now and then, at least.
Sales
Mostly newer releases in the sales list today, but there are some that are definitely worth checking out. Shoot-em-up fans will certainly want to pick up Vasara Collection for the ridiculously low price of five dollars. It includes nice versions of Vasara 1 & 2, along with a spiffy 3D remix. 99Vidas is a cool little beat-em-up that certainly has its fans, and Tiny Troopers isn’t too shabby at its sale price. As for the outbox, Mortal Kombat 11 is finishing its recent sale. You may want to grab it, or you may want to wait for the inevitable deeper discounts to come. Your call.
New Games on Sale
Vasara Collection ($4.99 from $9.99 until 8/15)
Tiny Troopers Joint Ops XL ($6.49 from $12.99 until 8/16)
99Vidas – Definitive ($4.99 from $9.99 until 8/22)
Rogue Bit ($1.99 from $4.99 until 8/19)
Box Align ($0.99 from $1.99 until 8/22)
Crocs World 2 ($4.79 from $5.99 until 8/19)
Watermelon Party ($0.49 from $4.99 until 8/19)
Super Wiloo Demake ($3.99 from $4.99 until 8/19)
Saboteur II: Avenging Angel ($7.20 from $8.00 until 8/22)
Escape from the Universe ($6.99 from $9.99 until 8/16)
Tardy ($2.99 from $9.99 until 8/13)
Event Horizon ($1.79 from $5.99 until 8/13)
Sales Ending Tomorrow, Tuesday, August 6th
Elevator… to the Moon! ($1.00 from $14.99 until 8/6)
Embers of Mirrim ($9.99 from $19.99 until 8/6)
FunBox Party ($0.99 from $1.99 until 8/6)
Mad Carnage ($0.99 from $4.99 until 8/6)
Mech Rage ($1.49 from $2.99 until 8/6)
Mecho Tales ($0.49 from $0.99 until 8/6)
Mecho Wars: Desert Ashes ($1.00 from $10.00 until 8/6)
Mortal Kombat 11 ($44.99 from $59.99 until 8/6)
Plague Road ($1.00 from $15.00 until 8/6)
Snowboarding The Next Phase ($4.99 from $9.99 until 8/6)
Switch ‘N’ Shoot ($3.21 from $4.59 until 8/6)
Tactical Mind ($0.99 from $2.99 until 8/6)
War Theatre ($1.00 from $10.00 until 8/6)
That’s all that’s good for today, friends. Tomorrow will see a few new releases, with DC Universe Online being the big name of the bunch. We’ll also have whatever news and sales come along, plus a review or two provided time allows. As for me, I’m just trying to survive the unpleasantness that is the Japanese summer without collapsing. I’ll see you all tomorrow, and as always, thanks for reading!
