MIGHT'N MOW'EM Coop-Survivors OnlineSwitch eShop

Having sampled the ridiculously simplistic splendour of Vampire Survivors last year, I figured I’d take a look at some others in this seemingly emergent roguelite survival danmaku shmup Frankengenre. Twilight Survivors is one I have lined up for later this week, which looks a lot sillier than its counterpart, but in the meantime I tripped over Might’n Mow’em.

And I have to say, in all honesty, I really cannot recommend that anyone else even casts an eye over it, never mind drops coin on it. Not in its current form.

Right from installation, there were problems. I couldn’t even get it to play ball in the title screen. This, it turns out, is because Docked mode is not supported - and that’s how my Switch spends the vast majority of its time. Didn’t exactly shout that from the rooftops on the eShop website.

So I had a bash at handheld mode - and to put no finer a point on it, this game pales in comparison to Vampire Survivors. Rather than being surrounded by enemies from all angles, you find yourself playing the part of Benny Hill being chased around by a much smaller group at the end of the show. However, while the bawdy British comedy legend tore arse around the scene like Speedy Gonzales after six cans of Red Bull, here your rate of movement is that of a snail on Nytol. You often find yourself confined to a small portion of the map trying to suck up XP exposed on the edges of the crowd, instead of being encouraged to explore a level in search of nicer goodies.

And then there’s the frame rate. Oh, Christ on Fire, the frame rate.

When it gets going (or attempts to, let’s be polite for a moment at least), Might’n Mow’em slows to the kind of crawl I haven’t seen since Space Rogue on the C64 over 30 years ago. And that’s with an enemy count not even in the 50s. Granted, the side-scrolling overworld is silky smooth, but once you’re in the game itself, 60fps is almost a pipe dream - hell, just a few minutes deep and you’re struggling for 10fps. Make it to the latter stages of a 20-minute run and you’re looking at sub-5fps. When Vampire Survivors barely drops 0.05 below 60fps even when the screen is absolutely raging with enemies, there really is no excuse for a similar title to not so much run as walk.

Oh yes - and now that I’ve had a play in handheld mode, apparently now it isn’t so fussed about being docked. Shame that playing on a larger screen amplifies how slow it is.

The tin hat on it all occurred when I finally managed to complete a run - when the portal back to the overworld appeared, the game just froze. Absolutely rock solid. No response from the controller at all.

Dopamine rush? Pfft. I’d get more of a kick out of sitting in a freezing York train station waiting room at 2am. (Which I’ve done - being a convention organiser isn’t all it’s cracked up to be sometimes.) Go nowhere near.