Summer Catchers

Genre: Arcade / Auto-Runner

Players: 1

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Review:

Summer Catchers is an Arcade-style game with Auto-Runner elements that has players taking the role of a kid who decides to ditch their Northern snowy home in favor of a warmer Southern locale, making use of a rickety wooden car to make the trip. This game was first released on PC in 2019 before being ported to mobile devices and ultimately the Nintendo Switch in 2021.

The presentation here is lovely, using some nice pixel art visuals and a catchy chiptune soundtrack to give the game a nice old-fashioned feel. There’s nothing outright impressive here, but it’s nice nonetheless.

As for the gameplay, players will be travelling along a side-scrolling level with randomly-generated obstacles, and must react to those obstacles using power-ups purchased between levels, with those power-ups also becoming available to the player at random. Beyond this, there are mushrooms to collect in the level to use as currency, and various tasks to complete to further progression.

Because both obstacles and power-ups are dictated by a random number generator, this can make success or failure in a run often feel like a matter of pure luck. Players can swap out one power-up for a new (also random) one, but this comes with a cooldown, and the constant forward progression of your vehicle doesn’t give you much time to respond to oncoming hazards, especially if you don’t already have the hazard’s counter in one of your three inventory slots.

At the very leat I can say that the Nintendo Switch version of the game is likely the ideal place to play it – the touchscreen is supported very well here and will feel more natural to this style of game than the PC’s mouse controls, but the standard gamepad controls are a nice alternative… though I will say it would have been nice to assign buttons to each of the power-up slots, or possibly to each of the types of power-ups.

In the end, Summer Catchers has charm in absolute abundance, but the gameplay is so random that it’s difficult to enjoy it. Players will find themselves going only for brief spurts in-between dying, and those deaths will often seem due to poor luck more than poor skill or bad decision-making. And as much as a charming presentation can help to make up for a game’s deficiencies, it can’t really make up for the fact that the gameplay itself just isn’t fun.

tl;dr – Summer Catchers is an Arcade-style game with Auto-Runner elements that has you using power-ups to get your speeding wooden car past obstacles. Unfortunately, both the power-ups and obstacles are randomized, leading to a lot of deaths due to that randomization. And while the presentation here is absolutely delightful, it doesn’t make up for gameplay that just isn’t fun.

Grade: C-

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