Swap This! Review

Switch and Swap.

If you’re partial to the odd puzzle game then you may be familiar with Two Tribes for their work on Toki Tori and Toki Tori 2. They’ve now brought Swap This! to the Switch, which is a nautical inspired puzzler. It’s a simple concept of the traditional match four style gameplay that has seen a rise in popularity since the release of mobile games (we’re looking at you Candy Crush).

The aim of the game is to swap different coloured fish in order to match four or more and help them to escape from their icy imprisonment – depending on what mode you play, you might be reaching for a high score, defending yourself from a giant fish or trying to complete a set puzzle in a certain amount of moves. You can play the game in either handheld or tv mode – in handheld it is entirely touch screen and on the tv you can play with one joycon and the point sensor. As you can probably gather it’s a lot more comfortable in handheld mode given the strategic and time focused elements of the game.

There are four modes to choose from, Puzzle is where you’ll find the main bulk of the challenges and it’s split into three categories; easy, medium and hard. There are a total of 45 to complete with 15 challenges in each. As soon as you get out of the easy category you’re in for a few real head scratchers. You’re awarded a gold, silver or bronze medal based on how many moves it takes you to complete the puzzle and to do this you must ensure all the fish have been matched and set free. You can swap any tile anywhere on the board which provides you with a lot more varied options when faced with some of the later challenges.

Fish Fight has you swapping ice blocks frantically but strategically to create colour combinations and bonuses which help you to keep a very large fish at bay. On the left hand side you can see how close to the surface the fish is and the more matches and combinations you get the more he’ll get pushed lower, once he’s at the bottom you move onto the next round and continue until you are bested by your fishy fiend.

Wave Mode will have you setting free a specified amount of fish and each stage you complete the amount will go up by ten, this one is probably my favourite mode as it really encourages you to find a more strategic way of playing. Just finding the first available matches may not suffice. Finally, there is Wave Mode which gives you a couple of minutes to reach your best possible score, perfect to jump into if you’re looking for just a quick few rounds to try and beat your previous scores!

There are pre-set high scores already built into the game for each mode as well so trying to reach the top of the leader board does provide quite the challenge. For the small price of £1.09 it’s a great little package which provides a good variety of modes to choose from. The graphics are colourful and cute and whilst it won’t be something you’ll probably invest a massive amount of time with it’s good for those days you’re not after a heavy investment.