Rawr-Off

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Rawr-Off is a simple Arcade-style game that basically plays like competitive Wack-A-Mole. Two competitors fight from opposite sides of the screen, and players must click on chickens as they light up in the player’s color, and then click on the player’s icon to let loose an attack.

In TV mode, this is done using Joy-Con motion control, aiming a cursor at the screen to click on the spots in question. This doesn’t work very well, with no on-the-fly calibration that I could find, and aiming just feeling too slow overall.

This isn’t as much of a problem in handheld mode, which uses the Switch touchscreen and feels a lot more natural. In fact, the game even makes use of this in two-player mode, having two players both competing to tap on the same screen from opposite ends of the Switch. It’s a fairly unique approach I wish more games used.

The problem is that in the end, the gameplay still feels pretty simple. Even with optional power-ups, it’s still basically just Wack-A-Mole, and it gets old quickly. Worse still, the target audience this game feels best-suited for, young children, is also the one I worry is most likely to break the Switch while struggling over it in multiplayer.

As for the presentation, this game’s sound and visuals get the job done without being especially distinct or memorable. It works well enough for the game, but that’s about it.

In the end, I feel that Rawr-Off does a good job of adding a twist to a classic Arcade game to give it a multiplayer angle, and I think its approach to multiplayer in handheld mode is wonderful, but the motion-control in TV mode isn’t very good, and even in handheld mode I feel that the game is too simple to be entertaining for most people for very long. Maybe a decent game for kids in handheld mode, if you trust them not to break the Switch while jabbing it with their fingers.

tl;dr – Rawr-Off is an Arcade-style game that plays like competitive Wack-A-Mole. It does a decent job adding the multiplayer twist to the classic game, but the motion controls in TV mode leave a lot to be desired, and even with the inventive way handheld mode was implemented, it still feels like this game is too shallow to be entertaining for very long.

Grade: C-

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