Justice Bundle Reviews #4: Switch 'N' Shoot
As an 80's child, I barely missed the heyday of the video arcade. I fondly remember a couple of glorious birthday parties at a local Atari-branded mall spot, burning bags of tokens on Turtles in Time, Captain Commando, and Knights of the Round.* But by the time I was tall enough to put my own quarter in a slot, the classics like Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig-Dug and so forth were already long out of date.
So in a way, Switch 'N' Shoot is like setting my birthdate back a decade and getting a taste of those games when they were a fresh new design: simple controls, high skill ceiling, and score-chasing addictiveness. Imagine walking up to a cabinet with these bold colors and a single, chunky, seductive button in the middle of its scratch-resistant console.
When you shoot, you switch directions. When you switch directions, you shoot. Does what it says on the tin
Switch 'N' Shoot has only one button to its control scheme, but that's enough to fuel a lot of fun. Your ship is always moving in one or the other direction, and pressing the button both changes your direction and spits a bullet upward. Mastering the timing of this single, multi-purpose action to clear away enemies and catch power-ups sounds trivial, but the progression of levels (an infinite loop, in true old-school arcade style) tunes the difficulty in a perfect curve that will keep you nudging your high score higher session after session.
S'n'S also boasts endearing flourishes like a procedurally generated pilot name for every new run, and a strange bearded announcer figure who praises your accomplishments and mourns your defeats, in light humorous fashion. For $4 on Itch, this gem will erase boredom in any five or ten or thirty minutes you have at hand!
* Why are the beat-'em-ups the ones I most clearly and longingly recall? Probably because you could get all the way to the end of one by feeding quarters and mashing buttons--no skill required!