Switchfire Demo

Sidescrollers are a relic of the past, something that just won’t look natural on a widescreen resolution. However, with enough talent and a touch of nostalgia coming from the right direction, one can still find joy in a top-down perspective, even if the pixels are way too small nowadays to have any personality on their own.

Switchfire may not be an original idea, given the fact that it is inspired from an old Amiga classic, but it can offer you a few hours of lighthearted fun, as well as quite a bit of action bundled with it. Rockets, lasers, and bullets cover the screen most of the time, while your job is to avoid most of them and shoot back at whatever comes your way, just to make it to the end.

As such, you have three vehicles to choose from at the beginning of every mission: a jeep, a helicopter, and a ship, for when the environment is more watery than usual. The enemies usually cover every medium, so you definitely won’t be safe up in the air if you choose the helicopter, nor will you be able to stroll around on the ground in the jeep without a care in the world.

To make things feel even more old-school, the game sports the option to play in co-op with a friend on the same computer, using either controllers, or the same keyboard. Hence, one can control the helicopter and deal with the aerial threats, while the other uses the jeep to clear the anti-aircraft guns and all the other ground troops that cannot be reached by the helicopter’s weapons.

Naturally, each level features a big boss at the end, which requires coordination from both players in order to defeat. They are not as difficult to beat as they should be in order to be memorable, but one can still have fun shooting at something for ten minutes straight. The colorful graphics and nice special effects should make the experience that much more enjoyable.

In the end, Switchfire doesn’t do anything revolutionary and it certainly doesn’t try to, which is certainly fine. However, the controls are a tad difficult to get used to and the gameplay is too easy to pose some kind of challenge most of the time, which can hurt the overall experience, at least if you are on the lookout for something to put your controllers to the test.