Given the steady pace of local multiplayer battle games of all types being released on the Switch, I’ll admit that they have sometimes tried my family’s patience with me feigning excitement and telling them we have a new game to play together. As you may have guessed, they’ve been burned more than a few times so it tends to make them pretty cynical. Since I’ve had to sit there playing with them, as well as typically playing the game solo if that’s possible, I only have so much sympathy, and we have been able to bond through our collective pain.

Armed and Gelatinous may be among the simpler of concepts we’ve encountered, as well as one of the most threadbare when it comes to value added features. When you choose your character, there are only the 4 premade ones which you have no ability to alter, and that makes for an odd disappointment since usually people can at least exercise a little more creativity in making their selection. Instead, you’re more likely in this case to have people fighting over who gets the dopey one nobody wants, and things like that. But I digress. 

Moving onto the play itself, it’s an odd mixed bag. For the modes that are more geared towards battle, the focus is on how you set yourself up with weapons and how you’ll be able to counter someone who has hogged everything for themselves and is flattening everyone. The trick with the weapons is you’ll want to be careful, when possible, to have them make contact with your character where you want them to stick out from. Whether the weapons are melee or ones that shoot, you won’t be able to reposition them, so if you aren’t careful you might be lopsided, a juggernaut of destruction on one side and weak as a kitten on the other. As for how you can counter anyone who is tanking it up, the solution is effectively thrusting yourself into them with your powered-up boost. The only thing that sucks is that we all struggled with trying to do this effectively. Of course, when you’re playing with bots, no matter how depowered, they seemed to do it quite effortlessly so we generally threw up our hands trying to master it in any way. There are some non-battle modes as well including one more like soccer and another like dodgeball, but neither are terribly deep either and we got bored with them very quickly.

Granted, having played a ton of these games already, we’re getting to the point where we’re difficult to entertain for more than a handful of minutes, let alone impress. The problem is, despite the quirks that do make this a pretty unique game in principle, that still didn’t make it any less repetitive and dull in just about no time at all. As I’ve said before, with the right crowd you can make just about any multiplayer game a good time, joking around and trash talking… but that’s not necessarily a function of great gameplay as much as people just having fun. Remove any alcohol or rowdiness from the picture, and this just isn’t very good.