Embr (Switch) Review | Nintendo Life

At first glance, Muse Games ‘Embr reminded us of wild comedy titles like Overcooked and Tarsier Games’ excellent The Stretchers. This is a bright and colorful mess centered on firefighting carnage multiplayer that also comes across as satirical irony about the state of 21st century capitalism. It has the shaky physics, goofy voice acting, ridiculous stage layouts, and screaming upgrades “This is all going to be a lot of fun!” However, in reality everything is a bit damp.

The first thing to mention about this Embr Switch port is that we couldn’t, for six full days of trying, find more than precisely two online games to join, both of which only had one more player in their lobby. Yes, you can arrange to play for four players with some friends who own Switch (there is no local splitscreen multiplayer here), but the most immediate and easiest option for finding other people to party with on Embr is, to Judging from our experience, an absolute bust. Both the PC version and the Xbox version (and we assume the Stadia version) are compatible with cross-platform play, but the Switch version is missing this feature and it hurts the experience in a big way.

Of course, you don’t need to play Embr in multiplayer. All of its stages can be completed alone, which is the way they left us to make our way through this one, but it is very evident that it loses a lot of what would make it a properly chaotic laugh when they let you charge through alone. of burning buildings. . It begins to please rather than entertain, with its various flaws all the more apparent when you don’t have other people’s nonsense around you to help you ignore it.

As you progress and deepen your solo firefighting career, you are presented with three different areas of a city, each of which has a ton of jobs to take on, starting with simple rescue matters that you are tasked with taking out. a handful of “clients” from hell, even escaping missions in which you flee from multi-story towers and a handful of (rather terrible) boss battles.

Completing missions in Embr earns you stars and you will need a certain amount of these to advance towards higher level excursions. Overall, it took us around three hours to get through each level here, a time that would have been a bit shorter if we hadn’t spent a lot of time stuck in a particularly frustrating boss encounter that suffers due to the game’s imprecise controls. Turns out slapping a sarcastic Canadian with a burning barrel from range in this game is pure luck.

However, let’s not be entirely negative, the basic framework it is sounds here. There are more than enough missions, especially for the budget price, and each one unlocks a variety of different ways to play once you beat it the first time. Your first run through a building may be a rescue attempt, but then you can choose to go again in modes that see you rescue as much of a building as possible before it collapses, rescue a special item for a client, deliver food to hell, or burn houses while cleaning toxic barrels. They all play very similarly, make no mistake, but it is enough that if we had been playing with friends we are sure we would have had a bit of fun.

There is also a decent selection of upgrades and cosmetics to buy in the in-game store with the money you earn from successful outings. You can upgrade your hose power, grab an ice throttle, drop down sprinklers, breaking loads, throwing axes, a grappling hook, jump pads, slides, parachutes, and trampolines. However, in reality, most of these fun little add-ons provide little to no real benefit, as once you’re inside a building, once a fire starts, the only real option we find you have here is to capture customers or items as fast as you can, ignore the flames and get in and out with minimal fuss.

Maybe this is because we were playing alone, but we found that taking extra time on a level here ended in failure, we did. very little real firefighting, rather than quickly, using our Client Finder to determine the whereabouts of people in distress and get them out as quickly as possible. It seems that the game does not give you enough time in scenarios to settle in and have fun with your tools or the silly physics at play. It can also be unnecessarily frustrating, as imprecise controls make climbing stairs, lifting and placing objects, and maneuvering through hazards a bit painful. Yes, we understand that setting up stairs and watching them fall is part of the fun, but falling two stories to the ground outside of a building because your character can’t reliably climb stairs … yeah, not so much.

There are also a handful of other hazards introduced during the game (toxic clouds that can be removed by using a fan or opening a window, and electrical faults that must be turned off at their source, for example), but we found that you can just run most of these. , take the hit and avoid solving the simple puzzle at hand. Smells Bad Balance – These things should be instant death scenarios, or at least take away so much health that you don’t dare go through them by choice.

Once again as we write this we feel like we have missed a lot of the potential fun we might have been having here because we were forced to play completely alone, perhaps having a friend to work with would transform these irritations into situations that provoke a illicit laughter. It’s hard to say, and it’s a shame, because as long as the online multiplayer aspect of Embr is a flop, it’s hard to recommend that you remove it. Played alone, this is a forgettable and rather irritating experience that just doesn’t mix together the way it should.

conclusion

Embr has the potential to be a good time, a bit of carnage with friends that provides a decent amount of missions to complete and a ton of unlockables and mode variations to keep you and your team of rescuers busy. However, on Switch, this potential is almost unrealized, as the game’s online component is a flop. Get some Switch-owning friends to set up a match and you can find some fun here, but no crossover play, and considering a few other irritations of the game, this one is pretty hard to recommend on the Nintendo console.