Swap This! from Two Tribes on Nintendo Switch is a slick little arcade-style puzzle game. The game is reminiscent of colour match mobile games and is a quick and challenging game to pick up on the go.
Swap This! is similar to a lot of the colour matching games you’ll find littered around the app stores on mobile devices. The biggest exception to those is that Swap This! isn’t free and littered with intrusive advertising. The game is exclusive to the Nintendo Switch and is virtually free – it comes with a $1.19 CAD price tag.
Swap This! is a simple concept but it takes some speed and skill to master.
The game has differently coloured fish frozen in little blocks of ice. By connecting four or more fish of the same colour together you can clear them. Line up a chain of these fish that stretches all the way across the screen and you’ll also free (clear) all of those fish too.
The rub here is that once you connect four or more fish together they start to crack. This gives you a few short seconds to chain more together before the ice cracks and they’re free. This creates a sense of urgency and frantic fish swapping.
That urgency is what sets Swap This! apart. You don’t have to swap adjacent fish and so you can swap any two fish in the water. This gives a great amount of flexibility.
There are four modes which all have the same basic controls but with different goals in mind. In Minute Match you have a minute to clear as much as you can. In Wave Mode you need to clear a set number of fish in each wave before the timer runs out. Fish Fight tasks you with clearing as many fish as possible as a large enemy fish rises to the top of water. Clearing fish will push the big fish to the bottom and of course if it floats to the top you’ll lose.
As a change of pace from the fast paced arcade style gameplay of the other modes, Swap This! also has a puzzle mode that slows down the pace. In this mode you’ll be challenged to free all of the fish with a strategic sequence of swaps. It takes some serious thought in the later stages and is a nice change of pace.
While the game can be played in TV mode using the gyroscope-based pointer of a Joy-Con, this game is made for handheld mode.
Taking its cue from the roots as a short-lived mobile game (developer Two Tribes released the game very briefly for mobile seven years ago) you can play the game with just the tablet portion of the Nintendo Switch. No controller necessary. In fact I felt most comfortable playing the game with both Joy-Cons removed and just holding the Switch itself. All of controls you need are on the screen, save for the home button when you’re ready to take a break.
At the end of the day Swap This! doesn’t reinvent the colour-matching genre, but it’s a genre that is underrepresented on the Switch. The game is cute, frantic, and fun to play. And for the extremely low price tag it’s well worth the loonie.
