King of the Hat

Genre: Action-Platformer / Arcade

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local / Online)

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Review:

King of the Hat is a family-friendly Arcade-style arena-based multiplayer-focused Action-Platformer released in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game has up to four players facing off in a single-screen level with various odd hat-wearing characters whose hats are both a weapon but also their greatest point of weakness.

This game uses decent pixel art visuals with some odd character designs (one character is literally a washing machine whose hat is a basket of laundry), backed by an energetic but not especially memorable soundtrack. It all works, though it’s not especially memorable.

When it comes to the gameplay, players battle it out using a fairly unique mechanic where characters can be temporarily stunned, but taking them out for good requires goomba-stomping their hat. This is made more interesting by the fact that hats can be tossed at enemies as your primary form of attack, both leaving that enemy vulnerable to your own attack and to counter their incoming attack. Of course, miss and you may be sending your hat flying far away from your person, where it can be easily hopped on without any way for you to stop it.

It’s a clever conceit, and it works well enough, but it also feels like it’s not really enough to truly make things interesting here. Each character really only has two attacks – they can toss their hat and they can jump on an enemy (or ideally their hat). Some characters get more mid-air jumps or altered physics, and one can toss the hat a few times after it has left his head, but overall this small selection of moves is all you’ll have to pull from. Furthermore, while the stages aren’t boring, they’re not really interesting enough to mix things up, and there aren’t any power-ups or anything like that. As a result, the novelty of this game wears off pretty quickly. At the very least, the core gameplay is decent, but it definitely feels like their should be more here.

Well, there is at least one more thing – while players opting to challenge the game in single-player can choose to play against bots or take on others online (CHECK ONLINE), there’s also a golf mode that has players trying to get their hat to a specific spot within a limited number of throws. This mode is a nice addition, but not much more than that.

Overall, I think King of the Hat is a decent multiplayer game, but it pales in comparison to similar titles like Towerfall that have far more to offer. Unless you’ve exhausted the Nintendo Switch’s library of great multiplayer games and still want more, it’s hard for me to recommend this.

tl;dr – King of the Hat is a family-friendly Arcade-style arena-based multiplayer-focused Action-Platformer where up to four players facing off with hat-wearing characters whose hats are both a weapon but also their greatest weakness. While this idea is clever, and the core gameplay is decent, there’s not a whole lot more going on here. And while players looking to throw down in multiplayer will likely enjoy this, there’s a wealth of better games on Nintendo Switch that are more deserving of your attention.

Grade: C+

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