Rascal Fight Switch Review – ‘Dem Kids Be Rascalin’

Rascal Fight is a casual battle arena brawler by Coconut Island Games, a small indie studio based in Shanghai, China. It combines many different ideas into one package and even has a Story Mode to compliment the obvious multiplayer. But does Rascal Fight have what it takes to compete with the other brawlers on the market? Is this a game that is your worth hard earned cash and time? Well, there is only one way to find out, so let’s dive in!

The story of Rascal Fight is a bit confusing. The world you exist on, Carlosa, is a planet filled with fighting, and the world and all its fame and riches are for anyone’s taking. Brawling is happening all the time, and it can apparently be heard from anywhere.

But some guy named Wilson is bringing chaos to the wold by dropping minions everywhere and spoiling Carlosa’s splendor. Thankfully, the gods of this world summon children of amazing talent and intelligence to save the day and restore the planet to its former glory (Whatever that is) by defeating Wilson and his goofy assortment of monsters.

It feels a bit lazy and does not make a whole lot of sense. Obviously, the world of Carlosa is a hellhole, and yet the gods are sending their champions, three little kids, to bring the planet back to the hellhole that it was before Wilson took over. I am not buying this.

It just feels so thrown together and nonsensical that I could not connect with anything. I had no attachment to the kids, I did not know who the bosses were before the encounters or why they were bosses in the first place, and Wilson does not sound like the name of an all-powerful evil boss.

I appreciate the fact that the game attempted a Story Mode, but it would have been better to avoid any effort here and put more energy into the actual gameplay, which…

Oh, man. I am not a fan of the gameplay for Rascal Fight. It is an arena brawler, which is a super-fun genre, particularly for party gaming, but Rascal Fight is sluggish and the platforming is not very good.

Controls are fairly simple when they work. Buttons are mapped twice so that you can use trigger-only controls or face button-only controls. It is somewhat of a twin-stick shooter, but I found the shooting aspects to be wildly off, particularly when using a couple different guns like the flame thrower and ice blaster. Not only that, but I also experienced button lag way too often, which made certain scenarios like boss fights more frustrating than they should have been.

The Story Mode is quite repetitive and often times boring. There are only a handful of missions, and they are usually split between minion levels and boss levels, although that rhythm does change after the third boss. Stage difficulty ranges from way too easy to insanely hard, and this infrequence caused a lot of head ache. There is not a whole lot of incentive to play the Story Mode, but it does exist, so I have to give it credit for at least trying. However, it was not a fun experience for me.

The cornerstone of the entire game is the battle mode, which pins 2-4 players locally in a wild party-like fighting system. Rounds go by pretty quickly, since a win is established by the last standing player and everyone only starts with one life. You can die when your health is depleted, you fall into a hazard or off the ledge, or you explode from one of the various means in the game. After one survivor remains, they receive points for their placement, and you continue to the next round until. Rinse and repeat until 5 rounds have finished.

It is a decent little battler, but the lack of fighters and the limited amount of stages causes this to grow stale quickly. There are only three fighters to choose from, so in a 4-player game, at least two people will indefinitely have the same character. The stages are the same rehashed ones from the Story Mode, and with only up to four players, they feel rather empty and a bit too large for a 4-player game.

Overall, the gameplay for Rascal Fight is quite below average and does not encourage replay. I think most people who will give this a try will close and delete it within an hour. Unfortunately, I was not able to do that.

The soundtrack is not bad. It provides a decent background to what is happening on screen, so I cannot complain too much hear. A little more variety could have helped, but overall, it serves its role well.

The announcer is all right, too, but hearing each and every pick up announced gets annoying very fast. I can only handle so much “SHOTGUN!”, “SHOTGUN!”, “SHOTGUN!” before I get tired and want to mute the game completely. It would be nice if you can turn the announcer off in the settings, but sadly, that is not the case.

Rascal Fight has a cute artistic design and is a bit charming at first glance. The colors are bright, the character models all look really good, and the stages are filled with lots of stuff to interact with.

But I did experience a decent amount of slowdown while playing, particularly boss fights in Story Mode and 4-player battles when everyone was shooting guns at the same time. During boss battles, especially, the game would just lag, so my button presses were not registering and I would unfairly get killed way more than I could tolerate.

Although the game is not very expensive, at $11.99, it is hard for me to recommend because of all the issues I mentioned in the review so far.

Rascal Fight has a lot of potential, but gameplay and performance issues really hurt my enjoyment. Even when I played the battle mode with friends and family, the consensus was, “When are we quitting this game and playing something more fun?” That was basically my sentiment the whole time I was playing the game for this review.

This is a game that should be a lot better than it actually is, and that is quite sad to admit. Even at a large discount, I do not know if Rascal Fight will still be worth it unless the developers address all of the issues currently plaguing the game. For the time being, this is just not a game I could recommend to anyone. You are better off spending your money elsewhere.

---

Rascal Fight Review provided by Nintendo Link
Developer: Coconut Island Games
Release Date: April 2, 2020
Price: $11.99, £9.99, €10.99
Game Size: 3.9 GB