While perhaps the Switch could use a bit more indie representation when it comes to fighting games, the platform at least has a variety of solid modern and throwback titles to make genre fans happy. Blazing Strike has now stepped up to the plate, with the hope of cementing its own legacy in the genre. The problem is that through a number of missteps and shortcomings it simply isn’t worth any serious fighting fans’ time.

Pretty well no matter what your fighting game of choice may be, the first problem the game has is that on most any level Blazing Strike compares poorly to it. Opting for a control scheme that would best be defined as Street Fighter meets a generic beat-em-up, there’s a pronounced lack of depth or originality here. While that perhaps may make it accessible to more casual fighting fans, I’d say it’s likely to practically offend people who value deep and nuanced controls and fighting systems. This has really watered them all down, and thus doesn’t have any modes that demonstrate their systems’ depth, throwing up a pretty serious red flag. When you’re in matches the lack of depth also quickly becomes apparent as you won’t just feel yourself falling into repetitive patterns and strategy due to their effectiveness, there simply aren’t all that many varied moves and combos at your disposal in the first place.

Even when the fighting itself may not always be the best, the genre tends to pride itself on varied characters, rich lore of some kind, and stories that tend to be fun enough to try to complete the game with most characters to see. This is where Blazing Strike takes a very odd turn though, with a story mode that feels like a visual novel in many regards, throwing many walls of text at you to read through, conveying a really odd mix of science fiction, odd motivations, and a mind-numbing dullness. I tried desperately to roll with it for quite some time, hoping it would turn the corner and somehow justify making me read through so much verbiage rather than getting down to the action, but every time I thought it would take pity on me and come to a close it simply kept going.

That leaves you with a fighting game with too much story (an awful one at that) that comes up short on interesting fighters, compelling depth to its systems, and really any reason to give it the time of day. While it would always be great to see some more games in the genre on the system, when you have the major players in the space, some terrific retro collections, and even some solid indies represented, Blazing Strike simply offers nothing to justify wasting your time on it.