Retimed is an action, fighting, party game for the Nintendo Switch. It’s a slow-motion shooter with four vibrant characters, six unique arenas, and allows 2-4 players during gameplay. This game doesn’t allow you to play alone or with CPUs, but it’s a great way to hang out with friends.

The entirety of Retimed is simple. The game walks you through everything. Once you click out of the main menu, there are three different modes to choose from: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Tournament. All of which are, more or less, the same.

Deathmatch is 2-4 players duking it out in a shooter battle. You can choose which arena you’d like to fight in or you can choose Championship which allows you to play four matches, the game choosing four different arenas out of the six at random. Team Deathmatch is the same except you can split into two teams. You can choose which team you want to be on so you can do 2-v-2 matches or 1-v-3 matches.

Tournament is similar to the Championship option in Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch. You can choose to do a single battle against your friends or do best 2 out of 3 or best 3 out of five. No matter what mode you choose, each battle is fairly quick and you’ll find yourself doing multiple battles and sitting for a while trying out the different arenas and testing all the characters.

Each battle begins with the character selection. There are four different characters to choose from, each one with a different name, color, and look, but ultimately they’re all the same. There are no stats – no one is faster than another or aims more accurately than the others – it’s just all style. Once you choose a character, you’re free to roam around a small area and test out the controls while you wait for your friends to pick a character. Then you jump out of a plane and off you go to battle! The loading screen shows the controls as well, so it’s easy to learn them.

There are six different arenas, each with a cool mechanic. For example, one level is made of clouds so you can aim and shoot anywhere and everything. You can’t jump up or down through the cloud platforms, but your bullet can go right through them. Another is the power plant where there are green and purple teleporters to helps you move around the arena quicker. All the stages are fun and unique in their own way.

Each character can only hold six bullets at a time with various boxes of bullets throughout the level you can use to reload. Each match ends when one person gets six hits. What’s unique about this shooting style is that once the bullet comes into close range, a bubble-like shield surrounds you causing the bullet, yourself, and anything else around you to go in slow-motion. This is a cool effect and allows you time to think and possibly dodge – though sometimes you end up being too slow to dodge.

The graphics of this game are great. The atmosphere of each level are well done and fun to look at. The characters are also pretty good. Even though there’s no story to the game, the characters seem like they each have their own personality just by looking at them. The music was fun to listen to, though it wasn’t too memorable. I’ll admit I was too busy shouting with my friends during gameplay to really enjoy the background tunes, but I stopped to listen on the main menu to get a feel for it.

My only complaint about the game is that I wish there were more. I would love the ability to hone my skills against tough CPUs or have longer matches. Even an adventure single-player mode would be great. On the other hand, the game is so much fun with friends that I wonder just how much fun it would be to play alone.

With that said, Retimed is still a wonderful game. It’s unique when it comes to the slow-motion shooting mechanics and the levels are well designed. While the battles are short, my cousin and I played for quite a few hours and went back to it for a few days. We shared a lot of laughs and even made up some new rules for gameplay, such as trying to defeat each other with only six bullets and no reloading.