Pandemic Shooter

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

Pandemic Shooter is a First-Person Shooter released on Nintendo Switch in 2022. In this game’s setting, an alien prison ship lands on Earth in the midst of a terrible pandemic, with the aliens evidently plotting to overthrow the humans by spreading misinformation like Flat Earth theory. Your character, meanwhile, is a testosterone-fueled guy with a lot of weaponry who won’t stand for that sort of thing, and decides to go on a rampage shooting the tiny lizard-possessed zombie corpses shambling through the city.

Yeah, this game’s plot is… a lot. I get that this game is going for satire, but it feels like they’re throwing as many things at the wall as they can in hopes that something sticks, only to just end up with a terrible mess of odd elements that don’t make for anything resembling a coherent plot.

Throughout this game’s shooty action, you’ll hear your character trading banter with his female mission control partner. Joke after joke after joke, many of them about flat-Earthers. I get it, guys, it’s low-hanging fruit, but if it wasn’t very funny the first dozen times, it probably won’t get any funnier the next dozen.

The visuals at least are pretty decent, featuring detailed cel-shaded 3D visuals with a comic book-y look to them. It’s not a bad style, but it’s made worse by just how repetitive the game’s levels and enemies are, making it look dull soon enough.

This is in part because Pandemic Shooter’s level design is unimaginative and boring. Walk a little bit, spawn some enemies, walk a bit more, spawn a few more enemies, walk a bit more, spawn some harder enemies… it gets very tiresome very quickly. Players can opt to explore side-paths for bonuses, but most of these bonuses are temporary and not generally necessary, making them feel like a massive waste of time.

Once you hit a boss, the difficulty level spikes dramatically. Previously, you could manage with the simple combination of firing while walking backwards while side-stepping enemy projectiles. When the first boss begins to attack, you’ll start just taking damage, and it’s not entirely clear why, or how to avoid it. This game went from a total snooze-fest to “I don’t know how to stop dying” in an instant, and neither of those things are okay.

Oh, one other thing I have to mention here – the button assignments are bizarre and uncomfortable, and the game does not let you change them. Muscle memory have you reaching for the Y button to reload? Ha, no, Y is the pause button, you reload with the L button. Why? Who knows.

It’s a shame that so much of Pandemic Shooter is an absolute mess, because there are definitely elements here that have potential. The art style is interesting, the voice acting is okay even if the characters have nothing worthwhile to say, and the core First-Person Shooter gameplay is at least mostly competent. But this game’s problems far outweigh those strengths to make this a game that’s just not worth putting up with those frustrations to play it.

tl;dr – Pandemic Shooter is a First-Person Shooter where players fend off an alien lizard-controlled flat-Earther zombie plague (don’t ask), and while the game has some interesting elements, it’s ruined by its poor level design, its absurd difficulty spikes, and its bizarre and unchangeable button layout. At this point, you have plenty of other good First-Person Shooters to play on Nintendo Switch, don’t inflict this one on yourself.

Grade: D+

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