Review: BIT.TRIP VOID (Nintendo Switch)

While I’m glad to have BIT.TRIP VOID on the Nintendo Switch, it ranks on the low end of the franchise for me. It wasn’t the most memorable game in the series to start with, and time hasn’t been as kind to it as I hoped; it grows stale quicker than expected.

Certainly, the increased control isn’t a bad thing, as you have free movement across the screen. Your goal is to collect matching colored black pixels. But watch out for the accompanying size increase; if you touch a white pixel (which is easy to do the larger you grow), your combo resets. You can avoid this with a quick button tap. It’s intuitive, and I welcome the risk/reward element, as I do the addition of BIT.TRIP VOID’s checkpoints.

The fault lies in that the basic gameplay is only fun for the first few minutes. It’s missing that opportunity to advance by warning you if you’re near the black and white netherworld screen, and possibly a game over. BIT.TRIP VOID is a game that feels like it needs more to it. Perhaps more than any game in the BIT.TRIP series, this would benefit from online leaderboards.

It doesn’t help that this pales aesthetically to Commander Video’s other action titles. The retro look here is less colorful, with some of the darker background potentially hindering gameplay. While other BIT.TRIP games have music entrenched in my memory, I’m hard-pressed to recall much of BIT.TRIP VOID’s tunes.

For some, it’s a favorite, while others have it middle of the road. For me (and some of my colleagues), BIT.TRIP VOID is near the bottom of the pack. It doesn’t impress me much in 2020. But with six original games, not every series title will make the same impact, nor have the same staying power.