Bake N’ Switch is a fun party game, by developer Streamline Games, where you’re tasked with cooking up the right shape and flavor of dough for your oven overlords. In this world, each dough is sentient and comes in the shape of an animal. You’ll cook up foxes, birds, and monkeys all made of dough using a variety of characters, each with their own abilities. Of course, you’ll do it all with friends – that part, for some reason, is mandatory.
My main complaint about this game is that there is no single player mode. Even the offline mode requires a couch co-op partner. This severely limited the amount of play time I could spend on this game – I was at the mercy of a friend being willing to play with me. According to the game’s Steam listing, a matchmaking system and single player mode are both coming in the next few weeks, but that remains to be seen.
To its credit, the controls of Bake N’ Switch are very intuitive. The main goal of the game is to pick up and throw doughs into the oven on each map. You have a time limit to get as many doughs into the oven before the timer runs out. I could understand how to pick up and throw things from right off the bat, as they’re both mapped to the same button. Because of this, however, there arose some inherent limitations and contradictions. I often found myself in a precarious loop where I would pick up a dough and try to walk with it. The fact that the throw direction and move direction were the same joystick wasn’t a problem, until I found that you stopped walking when your throw power reached maximum.
Okay, no problem, you’d say, just decrease throw power. Unfortunately, though, since the throw power cannot decrease once you’ve reached max, you are essentially stuck in place until you throw your dough, sometimes from a non-ideal spot. On some levels, there was the added restriction that if you stay in the same place for too long, you sink into the quicksand. That’s no problem with your dash ability, but you can’t dash while holding a dough, so it’s hard to grab any without sinking.
There are a lot of great mechanics in Bake N’ Switch individually, but the way this game tries to pile them on top of each other, I think, doesn’t work so well. Combine this with the fact that the How to Play menu at the beginning of the game lists *every* tip from the entire game. I found out, after starting the game, that I didn’t have to read all of it yet and it would come up as I needed it, but I wasn’t aware of that ahead of time. Again, good to keep your players informed, but poor execution leading me to read all of them at the start. I think that’s sort of the overall theme of this game. Good ideas, poor execution. It’s nice to know, though, that the developers are at least working towards fixing their main execution failure, which is the lack of a single player mode. Along with new maps, perhaps they’ll even make adjustments to the first few maps, as they’re very repetitive, especially when you’re first starting off and can’t get the hang of a certain mechanic and have to redo a stage.
The art style of Bake N’ Switch is very cutesy, which is an immediate draw. The playable characters to me all had personality inherent in their designs – I knew who they were without having to read their backstory. The doughs were very squishy and I appreciated the cute animated cutscenes. I suppose a drawback from this great art is that every scene was prefaced by a loading screen. Not the end of the world, but there were times I was faced with 3 loading screens within 10 seconds, so it started to wear me down a little.
Overall, Bake N’ Switch is as it bills itself. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary, but it’s a cute party game nice to blow off some steam. Unfortunately, you currently can’t do that alone, but as that’s coming in the near future, I’m hopeful for what this game ultimately becomes. In its current state, I’d give the game a 6.5/10, but that could feasibly be bumped up to a 7.5 or an 8 if the single player mode ends up being as good or better than coop.
Check Out the Bake ‘N Switch Halloween Teaser Trailer:
For more information, please visit here: https://www.streamline-games.com/bake-n-switch
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Nintendo Switch Review
I am an aspiring game designer looking to explore the philosophy behind game creation. Some of my favorite games include Overwatch, Super Smash Bros, Portal, and Beat Saber.
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