Mighty Switch Force! Hyper Drive Edition (Wii U) Review

Unlike Mighty Flip Champs on the Nintendo DSiWare service, where two worlds spanned the dual screen DS system and players had to flick between the alternate versions in order to progress past obstacles to reach the end of a stage, Mighty Switch Force instead keeps the stages the same, but relies on making blocks appear and disappear along the way to add challenge. In the same vein as Divergent Shift and Chronos Twins, the concept of using two versions of the same existence works wonderfully in crafting creative worlds for players to face. See a block ahead? Simply hit a button to flip it out of existence, bringing another into view somewhere else in a stage. The idea is simple, and like some of the best basic ideas proves to work brilliantly.

Patricia Wagon is a cyborg police officer who is tasked with gathering up escaped female convicts before heading to the exit point, leaping into a giant robot suit and zooming off to find more elsewhere. Mighty Flip Champs has a set time to beat on each stage, making the collection of convicts a race against the clock, and thus encourages repeat attempts at conquering all of the short levels. There are times where there will be puzzles of such a complicated nature that there is no way the times can be beaten, but with plenty of practice it becomes a fine art. Blocks can be used to merely jump on, or in other inventive ways, such as crushing enemies that pass by them when they have been pushed backwards, bringing them back into view at just the right time to squish the pesky monsters. Some blocks do not switch out when stood on, certain ones act as launchers to reach new heights, and others draw Patricia into the background with them. All are used in a wide range of inventive ways, and the player must navigate around using them whilst trying not to lose all three health hearts.

Based on the original Nintendo 3DS eShop release from December 2011, the idea is to jump around the colourful levels - now much crisper than before thanks to hand-drawn updates delivered in HD - shooting at enemies in the way, blasting open containers, as well as taking full advantage of the flipping ability that Patricia has. This Wii U update includes the ability to play the game solely on the GamePad, as well as on a TV (where the GamePad then becomes a handy radar), and works delightfully well in either form. It also comes with the extra five stages added as a free update for 3DS owners earlier this year (bringing the total to twenty-one), plus the chance to restart levels if things are not quite going as planned on a speed run. However, the 'Hyper' part of this new download version's title refers to remastered stages that offer an even higher difficulty than before to entice hardcore gamers to double-dip for a tougher experience. These only open up after the initial batch have been completed, meaning that twenty-one stages later and suddenly the game doubles in size! Not bad in terms of value, right? Especially when the alterations are big enough in scale to keep the remasters feeling fresh, coming with brand new music to boot (and what fantastic music it is!).

Sadly there is no online element to share fastest level completion times via leader boards, but at least there is the chance to take snapshots of scores and post them on Miiverse. The workaround is decent enough, but hopefully full online integration will be made available via a patch further down the line. It also feels like the sort of game that might work well with two players facing off against each other using two GamePads locally, but since no games at the moment use more than the one GamePad, that remains nothing more than a pipedream for now! One person on a GamePad and another using the Wii U Pro Controller could have worked, though.