So now that the summer games session is about to kick off, and I’m wanting a distraction from spending another 30 hours in Zelda, a bunch of smaller games are starting to come out of the woodwork, primarily on platforms that aren’t the Switch, due to the previously mentioned Zelda monster taking out anything in its path, though with that said since this is coming to the Switch it does a little bit of a chance. One of those that caught my attention is Glitch Buster, an oddball game that feels like a mash-up of Destiny and The Emoji Movie, and I make that comparison as I put up my Spider-Verse blanket over Sony Animation for reminding them that they made that film. You can also replace that example with Wreck-It Ralph 2 if you are in the Disney crowd.
The game takes place in the world of Inter-Land, a sentient world set in the Internet, hence where the film comparisons come into play. You play as a tiny little emoji-like thing whose job it is to clean the newly formed glitches that have taken over the digital world by going on missions that are linear in design and feel more like you are running and gunning down a straight line at times. You can accomplish this on your own or with friends, online and offline.
The game takes a format that I haven’t seen in a while, mainly because most games have taken the Destiny approach to design; this takes a more arcade approach. You start each game in a lobby where you can walk around and spam emotes before you start each level. If you don’t have any friends playing with you, the game will populate your squad with computer-controlled companions, meaning the game while decide for multiplayer, can still be enjoyed alone, and to give it credit, the game isn’t that difficult for the computer to not seem completely useless, but it is better when you are playing with friends. You are given an objective and navigate through several floating arenas where your only goal is to “kill” all the glitches that are infecting any given area of the level before ending in a complex boss fight. I will say this the shooting felt fun at times; the game has moments where you have to all stack on top of one another to solve simple puzzles and also can quadruple your damage on any single enemy, which ended up leading to accidental discovery for cheesing some of the more difficult final bosses and enemies in the tail end of the game.
The game does have both online and local multiplayer, and I was able to try out both, and local works much better at the time of writing. Mainly due to the added chaos of the other players being right next to you and not having any lag reminds me a lot of games like Overcooked or Moving Out. As for the online element, it had issues, was only able to get it working for 30 minutes in a level, and 40 minutes were spent trying to get everyone in the same lobby. Then when we were able to get into a level, the game was glitching and lagging like crazy, and it took a few minutes to realize that this wasn’t intentional, just the game was starting to break at the seam. Then to top it off, right as the final boss was starting their second phase, the game hard crashed to desktop for nearly everyone except the host. So hopefully, this gets patched when the game is out in the wild, but it was still a massive issue that I had during this review period. But I will say this, if this game does interest you, I would recommend playing it in local multiplayer because it did feel like one of those games where playing with other people in the room adds to the chaos of the moment and brought back memories of playing X-Men in the back of the party room at one of those inflatable bounce places in the mid-2000s.
So, after all that has been said about this game, did I enjoy it? In some parts, yes; in others, no. I did fun mainly because I haven’t played anything like this in a while, so it felt like coming back to an old blanket I haven’t used in a while, but soon after, I realize why I don’t use it anymore when issues start coming back up. Like the game being monotonous at times, and felt like I was doing the same thing over and over without changing any of my tactics on approaching each mission. This wasn’t a game killer because I was able to get to as far as to what was available during the review period; I enjoyed my time with it; I just don’t want to go back to it, though I can see this gaining an audience once it releases on consoles when the full game goes live since didn’t feel the best for this type of game. Though I’m more interested in how the Switch audience is going to look at this because if doesn’t bring enough attention for people to look away from Zelda for a second, then it’s all over on the Switch.
Score: 6 out of 10
Reviewed on PC