A striking new side-scrolling shooter has (sub)emerged on Nintendo Switch.
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Our first impression was undoubtedly positive, and that’s because at first sight Earth Atlantis looks fantastic. Just like everyone else out there, we’ve been looking for things to play on Nintendo’s hybrid console, and a convincing art-style was enough on its own to prompt further investigation. The crosshatch style, with assets that looks like they were meticulously crafted using nought but patience and ballpoint pens, is instantly eye-catching.
We’re seeing a growing number of decent-looking indies heading to Switch, just like when we saw devs flock to the Vita in huge numbers when Sony’s handheld launched, and it’s starting to feel like Nintendo’s console is the indie dev’s first port of call as its relatively meagre library gives these often-neglected titles enough space to thrive (another fine example is the recently released and utterly lovely Golf Story).
While an appealing aesthetic might be enough to draw you in, it’s the gameplay that’ll keep you there or send you packing, and on this front Earth Atlantis is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a strange one, though, because, despite some frustrating design decisions that we didn’t really like, we actually warmed to this aquatic shooter and found playing it an oddly compelling experience.
It might have been the visuals that pulled us in, but after a while the impressive style ended up drifting towards feeling a little bland. You pilot one of four subs (you only have one from the start) and explore underwater environments filled with robots that have taken on the form of marine life of various kinds. There’s a plot in there to service the design of the enemies and world, but really this is a game about shooting stuff in your sub and dodging the return fire of your enemies.
These oceans are full of metallic sharks and needle-tipped swordfish that swim in and out of the background, and you’re blasting them straight away with your limited primary attack. As you take out more, some will drop weapon upgrades (or, if you’ve taken some damage, you might get health instead) that make you altogether more dangerous, eventually with bullets even firing out of both sides of your craft.
On the mini-map – unless you toggle it off – you’re pointed towards crates that contain weapon upgrades, and these give you a secondary attack (bolts of electricity, torpedoes, bombs, that sort of thing) that auto-fires alongside your main. There is an element of mixing and matching the weapons, and this extends across the four different sub-types, but it also feels a touch under-developed, and it would have been nice to have more decisions to make with regards to your build and the way the primary and secondary weapons interact.
Once you’ve got a full bar of health, a fully charged main attack, and a secondary weapon you’re happy with, you can engage one of the many bosses found in the world. There are almost forty waiting to be discovered and beaten, and it’ll take a long time find them all and defeat them, particularly because they nearly all offer a stern challenge.
Most of us have played shooters where screen-filling enemies come at us with seeming relentless energy, adversaries that force us to adapt every attempt until we eventually squeak past the challenge they set us. Earth Atlantis is no different in this respect, and if you like taking on challenging bosses that require patience and skill, you’re well and truly covered here. It’s a shame, then, that getting to these bosses can at times be a frustrating grind.
Some of the bosses that you battle are extremely dangerous, and on several occasions we were dispatched within seconds of encountering a new enemy. An untimely ending such as this forces you to head out into the world again to shoot enough low-level enemies to level up your main attack, and find the crates needed to secure your secondary weapon of choice. This can be done fairly quickly, but after a while we got bored of the grind and just wanted to get straight back into fighting those interesting boss battles. You can, of course, head directly to these aquatic villains as soon as you respawn, but going into battle underpowered is like fighting a tiger with a spud gun.
And that’s our main gripe with Earth Atlantis. After a time the visuals might lose their initial lustre, but the style is nonetheless impressive. The controls, an important element in a game like this, are tight and responsive. The soundtrack and the regular ping of your sonar is oddly soothing. The exploration of the world has you going back and forth, up and down, and was much more engaging than the traditional left to right of most side-scrolling shooters. Combined together with the challenging boss fights, it makes for a cohesive experience that, at first at least, had us going back again and again for just one more try, at least until one-too-many one-hit-deaths persuaded us to move on to pastures new. Still, genre fans have been spoiled on the Switch of late, with Sine Mora Ex also landing on the platform recently. Earth Atlantis offers a distinct and even complementary experience to the more traditional genre offerings, and it’s worth checking out if you’re into your shmups.
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Keyword: Earth Atlantis