Mad Bullets (Nintendo Switch)
I say all the time how much I love oldskool arcade games, especially light gun games. Everything from the later 3D releases such as Virtual Cop to the to the classics like Operation Wolf. Sadly this genre mostly died along with your 50kg CRT TV. There has been various attempts at reviving this style of game with Wii-motes and Playstation Move controllers, but non truly captured the speed and flickering white screen accuracy of the genre pioneers.
Mad Bullets is a Western throwback to this genre previously released on Steam and iOS but it was the port to the Switch that interested me as it claims to use the features of the Joycons to act as a pseudo light gun.
The game is a fairly standard on-rails shooter, shoot the bad guys, avoid shooting the civilians, and get to the end of each stage without dying and completing the optional challenge for maximum rating
Sadly my initial experience was not good! The reticle was either pinned to the top and bottom of the screen with next to no room for movement on screen to aim rendering the game completely unplayable. I research online and the meteoritic user reviews where overwhelmingly negative with all the reviews describing exactly the same problem. To make sure it wasn’t an issue with the motion sensors in my joycons, I started poking around the Switch’s setting for test and calibration to which everything seemed to be fine, when I noticed the ‘update firmware’ option for the Joycons, something I had never considered to do since launch!
Low and behold after updating the game the calibration gave a much more usable result!
Sadly however, the controls are still far from perfect. The reticle feels floaty on screen compared to the movement of the controller and suffers severely from drift. Of course there is a button to recenter your aim but here is where the real problem with the controls lies for me. The recenter button is also your reload button. This is actually handy if you need to recenter your aim and get a full clip at the same time but the problem is the reverse, every time you need to reload, it re centers your reticle to the centre of the screen. So if you're pointing left to shoot a bunch of enemies and need to reload you will need to physically spin even further left again to get back over to that side of the screen. This can be insanely frustrating at times. The only reason I can think the developer implemented this is to stop the player spamming reload, making the game too easy, but a cool down on the reload or accuracy requirement to complete the level would have been much more effective.
Looking at review for the PC and iOS versions of the the game it actually get very positive reviews. The iOS version controls with touch screen and the PC version controls with a mouse… BOTH OF THESE COULD HAVE BEEN IMPLEMENTED WITH THE SWITCH’S FUNCTIONALITY!! You can literally plug a mouse into the switch and use it, and it has a touch screen, however the controls are solely restricted to motion controls only with Joycon on the Switch version. It’s so frustrating because the game looks great and is actually really fun when you not having issues with the controls.
The game was released in 2019, it’s 2021 at the time of this review so I hold little hope the developer will revisit this now which is a shame.
It’s especially disappointing as there appears to be a really decent game locked behind the controls. The positives I can give is the the game looks and sounds great, there is some good variety in the levels, and assuming you are not playing a Switch Lite, you have two joycons which allows you to play two player without the need for extra accessories. the game is affordable at £8.99. If you can pick this up in a sale knowing what you getting into, you will have some fun with it if you like the genre, but frustrating controls really make it hard to whole heartedly recommend.