One of the more unusual phenomena with the Switch has been how it has picked up ports and even clones of so many popular games, especially in the indie space. While typically you’d think of these as coming from retro consoles, the PC, or other systems, it’s even more unusual to see them coming from the mobile space. Given the insane popularity, and high degree of playability, of the Angry Birds series, it’s actually a bit of a surprise to not have seen someone try to bring it over to the Switch in some form. While Blow It Up may not be a title in that series, there’s no doubt as to it being this game’s clear inspiration.

For the uninitiated who’ve apparently been living under a rock, this is a physics-based affair, though in a pretty friendly and watered-down form. For the most part the objectives and controls are easy. You’ll want to knock down every structure, and knock out all of the soldiers and objects on them. To do that you’ll need to sling what eventually becomes a variety of bombs at those structures and units, trying to blow them up, knock them down, and generally make a mess of everything… but in as efficient a way as possible. While initially it’s a pretty basic affair, the further you get, and the more bomb types you have at your disposal, the challenge will be first which to use in what scenarios, and then on trying to execute your plan by picking the right angle and power level to do the most damage.

In general, this works well enough, and for better or worse the results do remind me a lot of the playing games in the Angry Birds series. It’s enormously satisfying to use a single bomb strategically to destroy pretty well everything in sight, or dismantle a tough stage with precise shots. But it’s also extremely frustrating how randomly things can seem to go wrong sometimes. You’ll come up just short of the power or blast radius to knock every soldier out, or some other inconsistency like that, either forcing you to try again to pass at all, or to get the gold trophy for the stage if you’re into doing your absolute best. Probably its greatest accomplishment, but also the thing that holds it back a bit, is that on a general level it does feel so much like that series, even if rendered in voxels instead of a cartoony style. If you’re not burned out on that style of play, and have always wanted to enjoy that type of gameplay on the Switch, this is a reasonable opportunity for just that.