RUNBOW Review for Nintendo Switch

Headup’s next party game, Runbow, is a platformer. It revolves around the concept of color—more specifically of the level itself being altered based on the color of the background.

In most levels, the color of the background will eventually rotate to another color. Any walls, platforms, and lasers that match the background color will disappear until the color of the background changes again. This resulted in getting pierced by a laser beam that wasn’t there a second ago and being saved by what would have been a death plunge by a last-second platform appearing out of thin air as the background changed. I found this to be a very enjoyable—if not somewhat annoying—mechanic in the game.

Aside from the color-shifting, the rest of this game plays like a typical platformer. You can punch, jump, and bounce off the heads of enemies all for the sake of reaching the end of the level.

This game also supports up to 8 players for co-op. While having an extra player would help sometimes, the fact that a triple jump is considered an attack—which can knock other players off-balance (i.e: throwing off another player’s jump)—would result in other players sometimes being a hindrance rather than helpful.

There are 2 modes for co-op: Adventure and Bowlhemeth. Adventure mode involves selecting a level from a grid to complete. At first, you will only have access to one level in the bottom-left corner of the grid, but each time you beat a level, the levels in adjacent grid spaces will unlock (if they haven’t already). The levels have 3 difficulties; green, yellow and red with red being the hardest. The goal of adventure mode is to reach (and beat) 4 boss levels. The more straight-forward a path through the grid is to a boss level, the more yellow and red levels will stand in your way.

Bowlhemeth is essentially an ironman version of adventure mode. Your progress in this mode isn’t saved, so if you quit, you have to start over from the beginning. Luckily, the mode is not so merciless that it doesn’t give you checkpoints. If all the players die, they will restart at the beginning of the floor rather than the beginning of the mode.

Additionally, this game has 3 versus multiplayer modes in the form of racing, battling, and king of the hill. Racing involves being the first player to reach the end of a randomly selected level. Battling involves being the last player standing on a stationary map. King of the hill involves holding a point on a stationary map for 7 seconds. All 3 game modes would cycle between random maps and after 5 maps (or whatever you set the limit to in the game options) the player who had won the most games would be considered the winner. This game also has online multiplayer, but when I tried to test it, I couldn’t connect to anyone.

Overall, while I found some of the harder levels rage-inducing, I though the game was well put together. I think a fair rating for it would be 8/10.

Check Out the RUNBOW Nintendo Switch Party Trailer:

For more information please visit Runbow’s official website.

Jason Freedman

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I am a recent Computer Science/Game Development Programming Chapman University Graduate. I am a life long enthusiast of computer/video gaming and my favorite game genres are adventure, choice-driven stories, fighting, and racing. My favorite game/movie series include but aren't limited to 'Legend of Zelda'; 'Dragon Age'; 'Persona'; 'Sonic the Hedgehog'; 'Mario'; 'Metroid' ;'Megaman'; 'Naruto'; 'Batman'; 'Spiderman'; 'Star Wars'; and 'Star Trek.'

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