Pocket Rumble
Switch
Credit where it’s due, that’s a perfect name. Pocket Rumble is, as those of you with a little salt in their hair might have guessed, something of a love letter to the Neo Geo Pocket. Yet it’s also a fine descriptor for a game which achieves something rare indeed: a fighting game that’s perfectly playable in local Switch co-op, with each player using a single Joy-Con.
Anyone who’s tried to play a traditional fighter on one of Switch’s detachable controllers will know the pain too well. The analogue stick isn’t quite where you’d like it, a little too close to the centre, and honestly you’d prefer a D-pad. The shoulder buttons are a little hard to find, too. Six-button fighters are playable, just about, but far from optimal.
Pocket Rumble’s solution is elegant, intuitive and, crucially, involves no dumbing down whatsoever. The game is played using only two buttons, with downward diagonals on the D-pad, and length of button press, performing different moves. Nudge the stick downforward and tap one button, for instance, and you might get a sweep. Keep the button pressed and you’ll get a fireball. It’s ingenious, in its way, giving its cast of characters access to a full fighting-game moveset using what effectively boils down to two inputs. Singleplayer AI isn’t up to much, unfortunately, and varies tremendously from one character to the next. Tenchi plays a solid footsies game and Parker parries well, but Keiko spams her cat attack with reckless abandon
Developer Cardboard Robot doesn’t stop there, either. The cast of characters, while admittedly based on fighting-game archetypes, are a tremendously varied bunch. Sure, there’s a Ryu analogue in Tenchi, but there’s also June, an undead girl who uses her head as a projectile, and we don’t remember seeing any of those in Street Fighter. Nor has Capcom ever borrowed an extra from a Twin Peaks diner like Agent Parker.
Yet it’s in their playstyles that this roster of oddball characters truly comes alive. As genre standard dictates, a super meter fills as you perform moves. Yet each of the game’s fighters uses it in a different way. Parker has a parry with a deliciously generous timing window. June can drop a clone of herself on screen. Naomi, a baseballcapped brawler with a run manoeuvre, can only use her meter for EX versions of special moves – but can charge her bar back up in open play with a button combination. It’s smart stuff, the controls meaning that if you can play one character, you can play them all, but that each handles very differently to the others.
Combo timings can feel a little strict – and, like so many games in this genre, could be better explained to novice players – but that’s easy to forgive in a game that strips away so many common fighting-game frustrations with such an easy elegance. They say the best things come in small packages; it turns out they fit in pockets, too.