Battery Jam

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Battery Jam is an Arcade-style multiplayer-focused Party Game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2018. Players take the role of one of various multicolored robotic-looking characters trying to cover a grid with their own color, with the dominant color at the end of a countdown winning the match.

The visuals in this game are simple but smooth, featuring clean-looking 3D visuals that aren’t especially impressive, but that work well enough for the gameplay, with bright colors and fast framerates. This is backed by energetic music that’s not especially memorable, but works well for the fast-paced nature of the gameplay.

As for that gameplay, your character can change the color of gray tiles he walks on, but tiles of other colors require a bit more work. You can fire a stun to briefly immobilize or push away an enemy player, but eliminating them requires either blasting them away with explosive boxes, bumping them up into the atmosphere by raising the terrain, or dropping the terrain or pushing enemies to submerge them in lava. Eliminating an enemy in one of these ways spreads your color to their surrounding area.

These various gameplay elements take a fair amount of time to get used to, and I would argue that the surprising complexity of the gameplay is probably the one thing most holding this back from being a better game overall. However, once you get used to how to play the game, it can be genuinely fun to work your way through enemies, slyly bumping them off.

There is one other element keeping this game from truly excelling, and that is a terrible lack of options. You can play solo or in teams, and that’s it – no alternate game modes, no online play, no special items you can activate, nothing. Even the selection of maps you can choose between don’t seem to differ all that wildly.

If you have a group of players willing to be patient to learn how this game works, Battery Jam can be quite enjoyable. It’s certainly a unique approach to an arena-based Party Game. However, that complexity and a lack of options and features ultimately means that this game falls short of the countless other better Party Games on the Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Battery Jam is an arena-based Arcade-style Party Game where players are trying to cover the arena with their own color by taking out enemy players via mostly indirect means. This game is fun, but it’s overly-complicated and sorely lacking in options and features. If you can learn its ins and outs you’ll probably enjoy it, but it definitely feels like an acquired taste.

Grade: C+

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