Having spent far too much time in my pre-teen and teen years in arcades, I’ve been elated to see the abundance of throwback arcade titles coming to the Switch. Whether in the form of re-releases, spiritual successors, or original games that tap into some of those same vibes, I’ve been here for them. While, in theory, making an arcade-style game for modern hardware that would at least compete with, if not exceed, many arcade classics… as an observer it’s obvious that’s not the case. The newest contender in the space, Final Zone, ends up being a great example of such an effort that just ultimately goes wrong.

A port of a game originally released on consoles in the 90s, Final Zone is absolutely a bit of an odd bird, and in all honesty it’s a bit baffling why someone decided to revive it in the first place. Played from an isometric perspective, I’ll give the original developers credit for trying to do something different, but the results are wonky more often than not in practice. Trying to navigate through the somewhat maze-like main areas in search of the required enemies you must dispatch before moving on to each stage boss is a chore as it is. Unfortunately, with the perspective then additionally makes it far too easy for you to take cheap hits as you try to line everything up and navigate through typically awkward areas. Also, while the different weapon descriptions in your loadout screen give the illusion of some cool variety, in practice they’re pretty disappointingly lame and visually far too much alike. When you do manage to get to the stage boss fights, there’s at least a glimmer of greatness, but it’s hard not to get bogged down by the more mundane gameplay you’ll spend more time in.

The thing is, even with the original game’s shortcomings you could choose to smile and play on, but then you’ll hit the really odd and pretty crippling technical problems with the game’s Switch port itself. I suppose the ability to rewind and speed up the game is a nice attempt at a value add, but the problem I had was with fluctuations in the game’s performance and speed when I wasn’t doing anything to alter it. There’s no getting around the fact that the experience is uneven at best, and when you add a technical shortcoming to what’s already pretty lackluster play, it all begins to come apart at the seams. Without pretty well any clear hero feature or element to hold it up, and multiple issues holding it back, I can’t recommend this to anyone.