I got to play Rad Rogers on my brother’s Switch, but I can’t say I’m a fan. The two most common enemy types are “run back and forth” and “stay still and shoot directly at the player,” and the level design never really does much with them. There are larger enemies that are more like minibosses, and they’re fast enough that you’ll take a cheap hit the first few times you encounter them, but if you run away, they’ll just stand still, letting you take potshots at them until they die. There are also jellyfish enemies that shoot 5-way shots (left, right, up, and diagonally up), and there’s no foreshadow animation for when they attack. Plus, level 7 has a bright background that makes it hard to see them, and if that weren’t enough, the level also zooms the camera out and puts a foreground object in front of one of them, meaning you can’t blame the Switch’s low resolution in handheld mode. Sometimes, the game makes you go into the “pixelverse” which has a visual effect around the edges of the screen that does little besides reduce your field of vision while also mirroring what you CAN see, making it that much more jarring when a hazard does show up. There are also lasers, and I swear their hitbox is so large that you take damage if you touch the glowing lighting effect surrounding the actual laser itself (and the red ones kill you instantly). You also have lives, and if you run out, you have to start the level from the beginning, and the levels in this game are quite lengthy; look forward to redoing a bunch of what you already did just to get back to the part giving you trouble. I finally gave up when I made it past most of level 9 only to clip into the ground and be unable to escape. Even if it weren’t for that bug, I knew I wouldn’t recommend the game at that point, so I just quit and went back to my Steam backlog:

• Spork: The Manic Utensil Storm
  

  2 hours playtime

  5 of 5 achievements

This is one of those turn-based real-time games. The game pauses to let you decide what action to do (move, shoot, etc.) but everyone’s move happens simultaneously in real-time. The game is also heavily momentum-based; if you use the move action, you move to the spot you clicked (no controller support), but if you do anything else without spending a turn to do the “stay still” action, you’ll continue hurtling in the direction you moved, even bouncing off walls and enemies (though that slows you down). Later levels introduce wind that’ll further affect your momentum.

Level design is really bland and repetitive. The only enemy type the game has is the one that just shoots directly at you, but they’re even less of a challenge in this game since you’ll have allies that they may shoot at instead. There are a couple bosses, but the final boss is just a larger version of the regular enemies, and the T-rex boss got stuck on a tree and I was able to take potshots at it until it died. As for stage hazards, there are spikes, but you’ll only take damage on them when wind pushes you into them, many times even before you know they’re there (offscreen; you have to buy an upgrade to zoom out). There are some turrets; most have you push a button to activate them for a turn or two, but there are a few that are the opposite (always shooting and only being DE-activated for a turn or two when you hit their button), and I wasn’t able to find all of their buttons, so you can look forward to tanking a few shots just to get through. Sometimes, there are explosive barrels you can shoot, and there’s exactly one part where the game suddenly spawns them beside you, trapping you between them and destructible walls; you can’t shoot them directly or they’ll blow you up as well, so you have to run into them and hope the physics knocks the stack down instead of pushes them against the wall where you can’t do anything about them.

There’s a couple levels where you have an ally with a unique sprite following you (the spatula), but it waits until it goes offscreen, then suddenly bolts to where you are (or past you, usually), and this can cause you to ricochet away from your intended destination; it even got me killed and made me consider giving up because of how bland everything else was.

Not recommended. The concept could work, but the game doesn’t do anything with it aside from the occasional cheap hit.