Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is by far one of the ambitious smash game Nintendo is releasing. With more than 70 announced fighters and 103 different stages (Nintendo teases there are still a few more characters to be announced) you can be overwhelmed at first. And when I got to test it at the Nintendo booth at Gamescom, I was overwhelmed by the large number of different characters to choose from. Chloe and I ended up playing two matches on two different stages, one familiar stage from the original game and one new stage. A small disclaimer, we only got to test this title by using two of Nintendo Switch Pro controllers, we didn’t get the chance to test it with the joy-cons.
First match Snake (Metal Gear Solid) vs Zelda (Legend of Zelda), luckily both of us struggled to get used to the control schematics. So there was a lot of jumping, kicking the air and randomly moving around with no sense of direction. But it didn’t take long before I got the hang of it (almost). I used Snake, and I might think Snake will be downgraded a bit before launch, because he was powerful! rocket launchers, and powerful kicks from long distance really irritated Chloe who used Zelda.
Second match Inkling (Splatoon) vs Ridley (Dragon from Metroid), Inkling was a tricky character to use as I had to reload the ink gun all the time. To be fair, of the four characters we tested. I felt like most of them are fairly balanced, except for Snake. The control schematics on the Pro controllers is a bit clunky, as we found ourselves jumping around a lot (multiple jumps buttons). On the positive side, the game runs smoothly on the Switch for now. So it will be really interesting to see what they do regarding storage etc of this massive title.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launches for the Nintendo Switch 7, December 2018.
