Hey guys and gals, I received an early copy of the Switch version of Tiny Barbarian DX to review!  Unlike what we often see with Nintendo ports, it's not just a late port of the game - it's actually got twice the content of the original Steam release!  However, this comes at a catch, as publisher Nicalis tripled the price from $10 to $30 a few months back to prepare for this version.  Is it worth that $30 launch price, though?  I dive into that here:

Some notes:

Tiny Barbarian DX is an action-platformer hybrid with beat-em-up elements. The entire game is played with two buttons: B is jump and Y is attack. There are light combos, and your character can grab onto ledges. The ledge-grabbing doesn't feel reliable, but thankfully there's an auto-grab option in the pause menu.

The game looks and sounds really solid, although the soundtrack ends up being something that goes in one ear and out another.

The gameplay is at times enjoyable, but the level design, enemy placement, hitboxes, et alia res all just fall apart pretty quickly. Each room is a checkpoint, which means that each room can be designed to be incredibly lengthy and difficult. Rooms don't usually get super long, but they are full of erratic enemy placement all the time. The enemy patterns are often set up in such a way that you're more or less forced to take a few hits, and with only six HP before you die, that means you're going to die a lot here. It's not the same kind of difficulty you'd expect from a retro platformer like Mega Man or Castlevania, it just feels artificial and, simply put, poorly made at times. Not to mention that in order to justify the combos, each enemy takes multiple hits to kill. With no RPG elements to make the early enemies more of a breeze, you're going to be stuck mashing the Y button pretty often on dozens of the same enemies in some rooms!

The third and fourth chapters, which were released for the first time today with the Switch port, magnify these problems, with aggravating bosses, cheap level design, and so on. By the end of each chapter, I felt the game had overstayed its welcome, despite the occasional enjoyment I got.

That said, you can tell the developers put their hearts into this game, the charm factor is through the roof at times! It just comes at the expense of some polish.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend the game at $30. There are better platformers that do more for less on the Switch already.  I wouldn't really recommend it at all, but if you're interested already, and the price were to drop to, say, $15, I think its drawbacks would be much easier to look past to find the few bright spots the game has. $20 would be my absolute ceiling if I were you.

Lmao, 30 bucks for an ugly game like that when I can get Sonic Mania for € 20, Stardew Valley for € 14 and Shovel Knight for € 20 (its still getting a new free campaign in beginning of 2018), Steamworld Dig 2 for € 20 and Axiom Verge for € 18.

I hope this is one game at least that bombs.

I should rephrase my sparknotes, that's on me, whoops!  I wouldn't recommend picking it up period, but if somebody's going to, it absolutely shouldn't be at $30.

Thanks for the heads-up. I was looking into this a couple of days ago as it had a good feel to it from the trailer (like a light-hearted oldschool title) but Im going to skip it now.

On paper it very much SHOULD be a fun game.  I really don't know where things went wrong that it ended up so lackluster at best, and so actively bad at worst.  The final boss, for one, is just ridiculous due to janky hitboxes, regenerating health, and some cheap attacks at the very start.  If I'm the only person outside of the devteam that beat the game in full, I wouldn't be surprised.  I needed to channel Mega Man 7 levels of focus on that boss, it was just bad.