Rainbows, Toilets and Unicorns

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1

.

Review:

Rainbows, Toilets and Unicorns is a Shmup released in 2020 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players control a man who, after eating a rainbow-colored ice cream cone, finds himself running to the nearest toilet, which then explodes into the sky propelled by a spray of rainbow-colored… well, we’re not explicitly told what it is, but I think we can all make an educated guess here. As he is propelled upward, players must blast away enemies based on various themes and pop culture references.

With a premise like that, it will no doubt come as a surprise that Rainbows, Toilets and Unicorns aims for lowbrow humor with a strong attempt at hitting that highly desirable “meme-worthy” status, including imagery that seems to be trying to be as irreverent and what some might consider offensive. The first level, for example, has you blasting away religious icons like rabbis, priests, and buddhas while menorahs and crosses litter the backgrounds, with bosses that include the pope and Tom Cruise jumping on a couch.

While Rainbows, Toilets and Unicorns is clearly focused on its droll, lowbrow sensibilities, that’s not to say that the presentation is low-effort. This game actually uses some really visually-appealing and colorful 2D pixel art visuals with an abundance of style, backed by an energetic chiptune soundtrack that works well for this game’s silly and absurd style. Unless you’re the sort of person who can get overloaded by bright colors, you’ll likely find this game’s presentation to be delightful.

Unfortunately, I can’t say as much for the gameplay. As Shmups go, this game is not especially compelling, with pretty standard gameplay and level and enemy design that feels uninspired, even if it’s stylistically interesting. You’ll just be bombarded with the same 3-4 simple enemies over and over again until you face a boss that does little more than radiate simple patterns of bullets to avoid while you chip away at their health. You have a gradually-charging crash attack to eliminate bullets and do damage across the screen, and can grab pickups to increase firepower and shields, but overall there’s just nothing mechanically interesting going on here.

However, even worse than this is the fact that Rainbows, Toilets and Unicorns forces players to take on each “world” with only one life. Despite that the difficulty level in the gameplay is fairly tame for a Shmup, this choice artificially ramps up that difficulty, meaning that one small mistake is all it takes to force you to restart your entire run. It’s not even like this game provides a Roguelike/Roguelite benefit to each new run, either – if you get hit, you’re just pluck outta’ luck, period.

It’s a real shame that Rainbows, Toilets and Unicorns is so focused on its absurd presentation that it dropped the ball hard when it came to its gameplay. If more effort was put into making this a fun game, I imagine the weird presentation could have helped to set this game apart. Unfortunately, with the uninspired enemy design and one-life limitation, if this game is remembered at all it will likely just be as “that crappy rainbow meme game”.

tl;dr – Rainbows, Toilets and Unicorns is a Shmup that has players flying around a guy sitting on a toilet propelled by a spray of rainbow… stuff. This game’s garishly colorful presentation and irreverent meme-filled theme help to set this game apart within the genre, but unfortunately its uninspired enemy design and artificially-challenging one-life mechanic make for gameplay that doesn’t even come close to the fun of the presentation.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}