Pew Paw

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

Pew Paw is a Two-Stick Shooter with some Roguelike elements originally released on PC in 2019 and brought to the Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game has you fighting off hordes of zombies with guns, using your own chain gun with components you’ll gradually be upgrading through your runs, as well as having the assistance of your dog, pointing you to pickups as they are airdropped into the area.

This game’s hand-drawn visuals are decent if a bit forgettable. They work well enough for the purposes of the game, but not much more than that (and honestly, the game’s environments are a bit repetitive and dull). The sound, likewise, works well enough without being at all noteworthy, and the game’s soundtrack is fine, although clearly comprised of fair use music (always strange when I play a game that has a soundtrack that includes songs YouTubers have been using for years).

The core gameplay here is good, and I love the basic gameplay loop the game presents: players fight off zombie waves in a level while collecting pickups, and after taking off enough waves they must contend with a boss. However, beating a level doesn’t bring you to the next – rather, later levels are gated off by your character’s experience level, and players are urged to play through multiple times, not only to gain experience, but also to collect money and components for your gun to upgrade it.

However, while this game has a solid core concept, the execution absolutely fails to deliver on it in multiple key areas. Firstly, progression in this game is agonizingly slow. You’ll likely play the game’s first level a half a dozen times before you gain enough character levels to even play the night version of that level, let alone further levels. The same goes for progression through loot – not only do you get these upgrades slowly, but their use is gated off by gaining character levels. What’s more, the joy at finding a new piece is dulled significantly by how boring these elements are – most pieces attach to one stat, and there’s rarely any reason to have a tough choice between two of them, as one always seems to be the obviously better choice.

This in itself might not be too horrible if players began the game with a decent capacity to fight and a good variety of enemies, but at least in the early parts of the game, the gun players are equipped with is slow as molasses, with a huge lag in starting up, as well as a nasty reload time (yeah, this game makes you reload your chain gun after as few as ten shots). And while there is some variety in enemies, mostly you’re going to be dealing with slow-walking characters who fire different kinds of shots at you, which requires little variation in strategy. At the very least the boss characters can make things interesting, but with players being forced to repeat levels, you’ll soon see these enemies repeat often enough that you’ll tire of them.

I like the concept of Pew Paw, but its execution is an absolute disaster. Collecting parts to upgrade your gun while fighting off hordes of zombies could have been a lot of fun, and I absolutely see how some tweaking could have made this a phenomenal game, but as it is, it is simply not worth bothering with when there are so many other better games in the genre on the Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Pew Paw is a Two-Stick Shooter with Roguelike elements that has you shooting at gun-toting zombies while your dog points you to pickups. The core gameplay here has a lot of potential, but that potential is squandered by slow-as-molasses game progression and a lack of interesting variety.

Grade: C

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