Rustler (Switch) Review | Nintendo Life

Jutsu Games’ Rustler tries to take us back to the top-down chaotic madness of the early GTA games in a “historically inaccurate” medieval game that has some good ideas and a lot of potential in its choice of setting, but then wastes the vast majority of this with nondescript missions, clunky controls, and hygienic humor.

The idea of ​​transporting the chaos of the classic Grand Theft Auto to this irreverent the old world The setting is definitely something that got us excited about playing Rustler when we first heard him. Getting around medieval towns and cities on our trusty steed, doing all sorts of mischief, and then having comedy stampedes, red and blue police horses trying to put an end to our rampage is something we desperately wanted to do. However, in practice, everything is very disappointing.

Rustler tells the story of two no-good friends, Guy and Buddy, who hatch a plan to forge some IDs to enter a big tournament, the best toffs who rule the hen house there, and take off with riches and beautiful maidens to a better life in somewhere new It’s a fair enough narrative concept that has more than enough to drive the short story here, but it fails on a fundamental level because Guy and Buddy are immediately very unsavory characters, true evildoers who never display any charm. Instead, all these absolute guys seem to want to do is drink all day, hurl insults, and murder in the blink of an eye.

The humor here is a mix of fart and burp jokes, there’s even a fart and burp button, foul language simplistically painted on the walls, overweight mom jokes, marijuana, alcohol, and a few more fart noises. To be fair, there are a Monty Python nod or two in the mix, but the unexpected glee of these is almost immediately drowned out by a sea of ​​mindless, brutal, childish nonsense. In short, there is simply none of the intelligence in the storytelling or humor that you will find in a Rockstar location here, and it makes spending time with the main characters or worrying about their fates an appropriate task.

But hey wait, this is it did you mean For a raucous, adult-themed type of game, we get it. Guy and Buddy are did you mean be unpleasantly crude; They are medieval madmen. It’s fair enough, and we could probably pass up the horrible characterizations and bad attempts at humor, if it weren’t for the fact that there are a lot more issues here, on a purely technical level, that make the experience generally unpleasant that it feels like. as if you are making minimal effort on most fronts.

Controlling your character, whether on foot or on horseback, but especially on horseback, feels really eccentric. We spent a lot of time during the campaign stuck in simple pieces of scenery, unable to rotate our steed and having to abandon it as a result. The simplistic combat is also hugely unpredictable. Sometimes you will slice and dice a crowd of attackers, other times a hit from an enemy weapon will result in instant death.

This then feeds on frustrating mission checkpoints that very often return you to the beginning of a level and make you do it all over again when you die. There were a handful of stages in Rustler where we ended up having to play the same mission multiple times because we just couldn’t get out of a combat sequence alive; not because it was difficult or challenging, but because it was heavy and clunky material.

These combat problems are also exacerbated when the game is played in handheld mode. Rustler’s top-down action should fit the Switch perfectly, but in practice it’s often hard to tell what happens during a scrap when playing handheld due to how small everything gets. Constant frame rate issues when being chased by a lot of enemies or indulging in a big fight further adds to the problem. Not that there are many major fights here, as the action in Rustler is pretty boring for most of its runtime – repetitive, small-time encounters against the same enemies ad nauseam.

The wanted system, which should be a direct copy of GTA, is also a disaster. You can reduce your search level by tearing posters from the walls while fleeing, an act that requires you to dismount from your horse during chases, but these posters are not marked on the game map, so you will only have to go around in circles until find one. You can also use one of the game’s paint shops, jump in, and have your horse spray again, but there are only two of these in the game, so it becomes a very repetitive case of traveling to the exact same spot every time. .

Enemy AI is dumb as a rock, chasing horses often catch up with you and then rub next to you harmlessly, refusing to attack, spinning in circles and getting trapped on stage. It’s also fun to see a scrum of guards immediately separate from fighting you as soon as you tear a poster off a wall. You don’t need to worry about vision cones here, it’s a simple shoddy on / off switch that tells the AI ​​to drop it and go.

Progress throughout the five-hour campaign is also artificially lengthened because the game closes the main story missions, allowing you to do one and then forcing you to play a certain number of nondescript side missions before another appears. critical stage of history on your map. Side activities are also rough and straightforward copies of things you’ll find in old-school GTA, transporting people, getting into fights, races, etc., but all of this is hampered here by those shoddy controls. It’s just not fun to interact with me.

We could go on and on here. The story is boring and disjointed, the game returned to the Switch several times during our tour, the unlockable abilities don’t give you any new moves, so the action remains the same from start to finish, it is too expensive for what it is. ..

There are some good ideas at Rustler. We love the surroundings. We love beat boxing bards that you can hit to change their melodies. The world itself is pretty pretty. There are some fun pop culture references here and there, and some jousting shows at the end of the game promise. However, there are too many problems to weigh it all. In the end, this feels like a classic missed opportunity – a neat concept wrapped in a short, clunky basic gameplay that never rises above very, very average and then gets dragged further by performance issues. It feels like a huge step back from the 20-year-old games you’re trying to emulate, games that are available for a fraction of the price and offer so much more in the way of fun.

conclusion

Rustler tries to take us back to top-down classic GTA action in a neat medieval setting, but poor performance, shoddy controls, weak humor, and a short, boring campaign keep it from reaching its potential. There are glimpses of good stuff here, some fun pop culture references, those beat boxing bards, and a sexy world to stomp on, but the gameplay below is so underwhelming and uninspired and in the end it all feels like a huge step backward. of his most obvious inspirations.