Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
Heart Core’s Gripper has a lot to love at first sight. Classic anime inspired motorcycle sliders, Akira? Yes please. Featuring a stylish young cyber-medium named None? Weird name, but awesome. A clever art style and a powerful synthwave soundtrack? You speak our language.
The opening cutscene features an intriguing setup. Returning to find her homeworld destroyed, None discovers that a disembodied robot head, reminiscent of Andross in the original Star Fox, named Zero, is responsible. Zero is not very nice and beats None to a pulp. His old robotic feline friend, Cat-Kit, brings him back with a twist: to live, he must remain tethered to his motorcycle to keep his new half-cybernetic body charged. Cat-Kit then reveals that he must also rip out the hearts of four Guardian robots in order to save his world and defeat Zero.
To achieve None’s goal, you control it during two different playstyles: driving None’s cybercycle through futuristic tunnels, dodging obstacles along the way from a third-person perspective, and battles of arena boss where he must use a “Grab” on his back. of your bike to grab items and throw them at bosses from a top-down view. This punchy soundtrack accompanies the action of both playing styles.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
Unfortunately, we have found a style a lot nicer than the other. The driving sections take place inside crumbling tubes suspended in space and filled with unexplained obstacles: spinning blades of fire, descending laser beams, piercing bursts of light, and more. Four successes for one of them, and it’s back to the beginning. Quicktime events using triggers and face buttons add a layer beyond just moving left to right. While these QTEs are simple mechanics with forgiving timing, coupled with the amount of deadly sci-fi debris in your path, these sections were difficult from the start.
We quickly learned to memorize where each obstacle would appear and how best to navigate particularly bumpy sections, so that when we finally got through the stage, after about 10-15 tries, we were able to manage it without taking a hit. We crank up the volume as we tried and failed over and over again, the synthwave adding controller gripping urgency with every attempt. Heart Core has done a great job adding the right amount of difficulty here; if we missed, we knew it was our fault, and we better memorize how those spiky beams of red light spun as we spun inside the destroyed space tube.
The same cannot be said for arena boss fights. When the driving section ends, the top-down boss battle begins. We hated every one of them, there were five of them, because their difficulty came not from our lack of skill or ability, but from a twisted core mechanic. Throughout Gripper’s short campaign, we’ve unlocked a handful of abilities: a shield, a nitro boost, and a jump. But it was the initial ability of the holder, the grappling hook cable on the back of the bike, that kept us endlessly frustrated against every boss.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
You see, using the right analog stick, you aim your grappling hook to shoot, hook up, and pull something towards you. During the overwhelming fights, when the little robots harass you while the Big Bad sends out shockwaves to startle you, he proved to be incredibly temperamental and unreliable.
Take, for example, the first boss with spider legs. We had to grab and tear off its legs; however, small explosive robots called Creepers also chased us. We could throw them at the boss to stun his first phase. We could also remove rocks to reveal health packs. Quite often we caught a bot aiming for a health pack, a bot that then exploded into our cyber face, or snagged a rock, inadvertently dragging us into danger. We died to the first boss somewhere around 30 times, thinking each death had more to do with the finicky grappling mechanic than our own skills.
Cat-Kit assured us that equipping what he called consumables would help. In practice, these elements, which were more like motorcycle modifications, did little to help. We got the most out of a healing ability, but a turret we bought and some mines only removed a few tiny bursts of health. The fourth boss was even immune to most of the available arsenal. Honestly, we felt confused, like we weren’t using consumables properly to help us win matches, but trial and error revealed their usefulness.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
It didn’t get better with a late battle against Zero. This climactic fight had such obtuse mechanics that, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t figure out how to defeat the Andross doppelganger. With no help available before release, we reached out to the developers to find out we needed to do something multiple times in quick succession. Without any indication that doing it once would have an effect, there was no way of knowing what to do. No previous boss had such a feature, neither Cat-Kit nor None gave us a clue. We’re told that additional visual effects and a slight rebalancing of this aspect of combat will be coming in a day one patch, but we wasted a few hours banging our heads against the crumbling space tube wall. Again, players at launch shouldn’t have as much trouble as we did here, but it’s emblematic of the broader issues we encountered. With more tweaks things can of course get better.
Adding to the frustration in boss battles was helpful, but endlessly repetitive voice acting. After hearing Cat-Kit say, “Do you know how to kill bugs?” and Nobody answers: “I must catch it and snatch it!” each time we fail against the first boss, we cut the sound of the voice. It didn’t improve in later battles either, with bosses only having a handful of jokes they repeat over and over like JRPG protagonists shouting out their moves every time they attack.
conclusion
With a sleek aesthetic, great synthwave tunes, and intense cybercycling through ramshackle space tubes, Gripper pulls off a lot and we enjoyed those parts. The repetitive voice acting can be forgiven, but the other half of the game, the arena boss fights, is terribly frustrating. The basic grapple mechanic doesn’t work too often with so much on screen, leading to a level of difficulty that begrudgingly requires patience rather than player skill. So, by the end of the game, our patience for this sci-fi genre mix was exhausted.