Ok, finally time to make a post that lives up to the name of this blog for a change and not just treating it like a joke.
Let's just get this out of the way up front: Eufloria HD on Switch is shit.
For a little bit of background, I played the original Eufloria like a decade ago and thought it was pretty fun. And I mean the original original, which I think was just some random free thing someone made that got mentioned in a post on Rock Paper Shotgun. I'm pretty sure it was also called Dyson back then or something.
It was simple and fairly elegant, with minimalist graphics that conveyed everything important well and an interface that I'm pretty sure could be used with a single mouse button and no keyboard. It was relaxing and laid back, with maybe 20 levels of low to moderate difficulty that I don't ever remember being stressful in any way. I vaguely remember there being some music I liked, but I'm less sure about that.
At some point it was made into a full paid game and sold as Eufloria HD, and I forget why I never played it. I feel like it was made by someone else or changed enough stuff that it seemed to be missing what I liked about the original. Probably. Maybe. This was still a while ago. And then I kind of forgot about it.
Silly me got excited seeing it turn up on the Switch and got it on sale just to have something chill to play when my brain's not up for more involved stuff. Wow was that ever a mistake.
It does work with the touchscreen, which is what I was hoping for and made the most sense from my experience, but they actually never tell you that. The tutorial goes on and on about the button controls only, and they're way more complex and involved than what I was used to from before. Also now there's a challenge mode and achievements and a story and all sorts of stuff. Ok fine, maybe that could be good.
All the additional stuff makes the gameplay less smooth, and both the button controls and touchscreen ones have a lot of annoyances for me. It's also decidedly not chill.
The sounds in the game are aggravating. There's a hissing rumbling noise whenever you're zoomed in on an asteroid, and you're zoomed in on one a large amount of the time. Thankfully it has a separate volume slider so you can just turn that sound specifically off, but it's a terrible sound that shouldn't exist in the first place. For bonus points there's basically no other background noise ever, even music, so most of the time it's just you and the slightly less annoying pew pew your plant ships make.
I stuck with it for a few levels trying to get used to it even though it wasn't what I'd hoped for, and then I promptly got vaporized by the AI on the fifth level before even really doing anything. This is supposedly a relaxing game, and on the default settings I got absolutely obliterated with no warning by an AI character with a larger number of units than I had and more of them, on a level early enough in the game that it was still showing me tutorial popups.
There are probably more things to complain about that I've forgotten while writing this, and there are probably also more to discover later in the game. I'm never going to find out though because I'm not touching it again. It superficially looks like the game I liked when I was younger, but if it was remade by someone who completely missed the point.
If I could use my computer right now I'd go dig up Dyson on my old hard drive and play that and hope it's still what I remember it being, but instead I'm just going to sit here feeling resentful that I felt too crappy to play more Hades today (now there's an excellent game that I'm just now getting to) and discovered this disappointment of a game.
