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Every 10 levels you’ll then face a more formidable foe, and they’ll have unique attacks for you to deal with. There’s also a slow trickle of new types of enemy units over the course of the game, though many of them are simply stronger variants of those you’ve already faced. The trick is to try to take out as many as you can with arrows but then make judicious use of your secondary attackers since you have limited MP resources and they all have their own cooldowns as well. In general you should be able to coast for a while through the levels without stopping but once you begin to struggle bear in mind that grinding previous levels will still give you rewards. My biggest issue with the game is that its pacing and setup still feel like a free-to-play game, only in the case of the Switch you don’t have an option to purchase a bunch of coins with real money so you’re instead left with what people trying to grind it out would be doing. The pace of gameplay is absolutely glacial, overall the degree of accuracy you’re capable of isn’t very good, and while eventually things no doubt do get a bit more interesting the path to get there is terribly dull. To boot (at least playing in docked mode) precisely what you’re supposed to be doing or how isn’t conveyed at all by the game, you’re more left with loading screen hints and an expectation that you’ll work it out. While there’s an edge of unique gameplay here it’s hard to find anything specifically redeeming about Samurai Defender’s place on the Switch. If things had been restructured more significantly and you got to the meatier part of the gameplay more quickly perhaps it wouldn’t be so boring. Unfortunately, it takes far too long for anything of real interest to get rolling and even then the style of gameplay as a whole lacks real excitement, even if it has a budget-friendly price. If you’re seeking the experience it offers I’m failing to see the case for doing so on the Switch.
Justin Nation, Score:Bad [4.0]