![]() Your attacks are fast and fluid making combat feel exhilarating, almost ‘hack n’ slash’. The real star on show here is the combat system however. This is in part due to your foes having a wide range of unique attacks that require knowledge, skill and timing to overcome. Fighting the bevy of brutish behemoths on offer is challenging, satisfying and thrilling in equal measure. Normally a game plagued with this many technical problems would be almost irredeemable, but Dauntless does manage to pull several golden rabbits out it’s hat. It is just not a pleasant experience, so keep to docked. It is like the whole game, your eyes and your switch is smothered in Vaseline. ![]() Presentation takes a massive dip becoming so blurry that it legitimately made me feel a bit sick when in motion. We cannot possibly talk about a recent Switch release without touching on ‘Handheld’ performance., All of these issues are present on the dinky screen. Frequent frame drops and freezes leaves the game feeling incredibly jerky at times, with these issues being exacerbated when the behemoths grow in size. Unfortunately, even with the fairly significant graphical downgrade, Dauntless does not run smoothly on Switch. Character models, enemy designs and the cartoony aesthetic shine through the weaker elements of the presentation and help balance it around the middling mark. Luckily the art style itself holds up quite well. There is a fair amount of texture pop in, there are jaggies everywhere (even the HUD!) and the lighting is quite weak, leaving everything looking a little bit drab. Hopping into your first assignment really highlights all of Dauntless’ strengths and weaknesses in a teeny tiny, bite sized package. It is down to hunters, of which you are one, to quell their population, harvest their spikey bits, create elaborately designed coats and beatsticks in order to kill ever bigger foes. Lo and behold, the gravity defying slices of the old world are infested with a menagerie of monsters. You begin by watching a fairly brief cutscene showing the world getting ‘sploded and the fragments of the earth becoming floating islands that humanity is trying to colonise. Seven months later and Switch users finally get to give this snoot-bopping, behemoth bashing game a whirl. Taking inspiration from Capcom’s long running Monster Hunter series, Phoenix Labs was looking to take a piece of that pie by making it ‘Free to Play’, giving it a Fortnite-esque visual style to appeal to the masses. Dauntless released in May 2019 and was met with a fair amount of success and fanfare.
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