Having played so many games since the launch of the Switch, I’ve gone to some pains to learn how to appreciate the variety of titles out there, and the audiences who may enjoy them, even if I don’t. Even when new releases may not be the best in a variety of ways, there’s something to be said for ones that simply look or play a bit differently. With all of that in mind, I earnestly tried to keep an open mind with Tale of Dark Lands, looking for the positives to its low-poly vision of a 3D action adventure of sorts. Even with that effort though, there’s still no getting around it being a bit of a mess.

Looking like something that could have come from perhaps the PS1 era, this ultimately ends up being a pretty rudimentary affair. Initially armed with just some humble gear, you’ll set out into a progression of areas with the goal of eradicating whatever evils may lurk there, though truth be told there’ll tend to just be a lot of the same 3 or 4 goblins a lot of the time. While you’ll initially be working with a trusty melee weapon like a sword, you’ll eventually get the opportunity to try your luck at range with a bow and arrow as well. In general this works out as you’d expect: Explore, kill, loot, complete your objective, and return to buy and sell, upgrading your gear and progressing to your next effort.

The problem is, there’s no getting around a number of issues that simply can’t be ignored. Despite its visual simplicity, performance can be a mess with all sorts of clipping, stuttering movement at times, and loads of pop-in almost constantly. You could perhaps choose to overlook those presentation issues if the combat wasn’t also very stiff, repetitive, and sometimes comically simple. Deciding I was bored plowing through one enemy at a time, I bum rushed an area with what amounted to a boss, found a perch, ticked down his health with my arrows without any real resistance, and then finished him off without much effort. This just feels like an experience that was cobbled together well enough to simply work, and then sent into the eShop without the repeated iterations necessary to get everything balanced, polished, and ready for paying customers. It’s playable, but compared to many of its peers the experience is sorely lacking all around.