Welcome to our review of Black Hole, a new twin-stick shooter on Switch!
Black Hole is an arcade-style twin-stick shooter in space. Choose your ship and embark on a dangerous and action-packed flight through multiple black holes. Shoot everything you can see and collect everything you can find.
This game has a great yet simplistic gameplay and just one flaw. Let me start with the good. Black Hole has a rather addictive gameplay. Fly around a very small area, shoot everything in sight. Avoid getting hit and basically use your upgrades in the smartest possible way.
As you progress through levels, obviously the enemies do get more difficult, from a few enemies at a time all the way up to bullet hell style levels. Each big set of levels followed by a final boss. Pass all four of the worlds to finish the game!
Buying upgrades is basically the biggest appeal of the game, either unlock your secondary weapon or quickly strengthen your primary one? Buy more speed or more shield power? It is all up to you to decide. But choose wisely, because that amazing run you are having? It all stops when you run out of lives!
The bad point, no continues. Every single time, you need to play through the first dozen or so slower levels before you get to the real action. All in all, not such a bad point, but heck, it can prevent you from immediately jumping back in and just taking a break or even loading another game, which actually happened during my gameplay. In the middle of an amazing run, third big boss, I lost my last life and just quit the game for an hour or two. If I would have had a continue, I would have kept playing.
Despite having 3 difficulty settings and a practice mode, this game is on the challenging side, but hey, nothing wrong with a challenge from time to time. This game is not unfair in its’ difficulty levels, which is a great thing.
Another thing worth mentioning, you can destroy yourself when you fly too far away from the black hole. I would recommend in a brand new game to test the limits. It will prevent you from accidentally losing a life because you did not know.
Graphically, this game is pretty simple, yet a perfect fit for a portable console like the Nintendo Switch, I honestly doubt I would play it very often if I had this on PS4 or Xbox One.
In conclusion, this is a nice little game that can be a great distraction if you want to play something lighter, but it is not something special. In this genre, this game is just another pea in the pod. It does have a great feel to it and while I enjoyed it, I also heckled the lack of a simple continue.
My rating is at 80%, Black Hole surprised me in a positive way and if you got some bucks to spare, I would suggest this one as an outsider.
