R-Type Final 2 Review (Nintendo Switch)

Let me start this review by saying I’m a casual shmup fan. If you’re hardcore into your bullet hell shooters then my opinion is probably going to be of little value to you, but if like me you casually enjoy the genre and want to know if R-Type Final 2 is worth check out, then let me tell you more….

I played the original 1989 R-Type to death on the Amiga back when I was a kid. I was never very good at it but that never detracted from my enjoyment. I haven’t really paid too much attention to the sequels in the following decades but R-Type Final 2’s trailer was enough to entice me to jump back in.

My first impression was its hard… REALLY hard! I jumped in with the assumption I can just wiggle my ship around mashing the fire button and stand a fair chance of plowing through the game. However after dialling the difficulty down to the lowest setting and still not being able to get past the third level I came to the realisation there had to be more to the games mechanics than I was understanding. At this point I decided to dig into the digital game manual and realised the fundamentals of the game I was missing.

First of all, L1 and L2 change the ships speed between 4 different levels! This is crucial to speed up to get out of a tight corner of ships and bullets, then slow down to thread your craft though tight spaces. I’d completely missed this.

The next step was understanding how to use the force… yeah no starwars jokes please… The force is an autonomous craft that either attaches to your ship increasing your fire power, or detaches to roam the environment independently picking off enemies for you. This I figured out on my own but a key mechanic I was missing is The Force can absorb enemy bullets and energy to charge a meter in the bottom corner called the “dose meter” which when full can activate a special attack clearing all enemies and bullets from the screen and dealing huge damage to bosses. So instead of passively letting the little fella do his thing, you should be constantly firing him out and pulling him back in to change the meter ready to get you out of a tight spot.

Then there’s the wave cannon. The Y button fires a singe shot but holding it charges the beam meter at the bottom of the screen to release a more powerful blast. Again I’d figured this much out on my own but was I wasn’t aware was continuing to hold Y after the meter is full allows you to to charge it again… even multiple more times after that depending on your ship, allowing a devastating attack to bosses if your able to fend them off without fire long enough to fully charge it!

So with my new found knowledge I attacked the game again and I have to say, I didn’t fair much better initially whilst trying to remember all the different systems and figure out which where best to use in different situations. 

But after a few more try’s things finally started to click for me. I started to progress further into the game each try and that was the point in which I really started to enjoy the game. It’s still very difficult with its trade mark one hit kills and somewhat cheap deaths at times. This is very much a game of repetition and pattern memorisation, but once I’d got a handle on the mechanics this meant I never really got stuck in the game. If you bang your head against a tough selection for long enough, you start to see your way clear of it, and breeze thought it on following runs. That is where the satisfaction in the game was for me. Plowing though section so the game with relative ease after contemplating rage quitting the game at that point the night before.

All of the information above made the game infinitely more enjoyable for me, obviously… because then I understood how to play the game effectively! and it was all accessible from the main menu in the R-Type Manual . Maybe it just says more about me, but when I get a new game, the last thing I’m going to do is read a manual. This information could have been presented in an interactive tutorial on first play and it would have been a lot clearer to me from the start. I’m all for a throw backs to classic gaming trends, but reading a manual to fully understand a games mechanics before playing is not something I want to make a return.

The graphics speak for them selves. The game looks beautiful. I’ve mostly been playing in hand held mode and sometimes things could get a little hectic to keep track of at times on the relatively small screen, but that was never an issue when I did have the opportunity to play on the TV. The performance on the Switch was fine for me. I’ve seen some complaints about how the game runs on Switch, maybe I’m just not that sensitive to frame rates, and I’ve haven’t played the game on any of the other platforms  to compare it to. The load times could be a little frustrating at times, especially when your constantly dying and repeating tough sections, you just want to get straight back into the action for another attempt and time between deaths and retries did become mildly frustrating at times. 

The overall presentation of the game and the amount of unlockables is very impressive. There are a huge amount of ships to unlock and customise, multiple virtual currencies to unlock decals for your craft, outfits emotes for you character during cut scenes.

If you’re a fan of the series there is definitely enough content to justify the somewhat hefty £35.99 asking price at launch, but if your more causal and just looking to dip in for a quick blast you might want to wait for a sale. Luckily there is a free demo on the store so give the demo a shot and see if you think its worth jumping in straight away, but either way if you’re a fan of the shmup genre at all, R-Type Final 2 is definitely a game you need to pick up at some point in the future!