Nintendo Switch – Zotrix: Solar Division #142

Found myself just setting up things and watching it go…

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Zotrix: Solar Division – Nintendo Switch – Released: 4/12/18 – $14.99

Short Review (Review copy provided by Ocean Media)

Zotrix is a PC port that came to the Nintendo Switch and it really shows. Much like another PC port that came to the Switch… it is hard using buttons. It took me a few hours to get the button presses down pack but found myself using the touchscreen as much as I could. Zotrix is a tower defense game but in space and off the top of my head I can’t think of any that have been in space. I would like to say this is the first tower defense game for the Switch but not 100% sure. It is a fairly easy game on normal mode but to spice it up a little I like to put it on auto waves and hardest mode. If I am really ambitious I will turn on fast mode which doubles the speed. For normal mode I found myself just setting things up and easily beating all the levels but hard mode with things spiced up it could be tough as nails to keep up. I miss this genre of video game just setting things up and hoping things work out and I hope Ocean Media brings the original game to the Switch. I would like to give this game an 7 out of 10, while there is no way of fixing the controls and the learning curve is high. This is a game worth trying out if you can push though to learning how to use the button layout if you plan on playing it that way or on the big screen.

The icon is fairly basic but you can’t read Zotrix unless your eyes are glued to the screen:

Story

The story is fairly simple aliens are attacking stations and it is your job to defend them. You are the new commander of Defense on a mission to find out what is happening to these stations. The story is told rather weird instead of having a wall of text, it has the game give you one liners with each scene playing out. It is weird since at one point in the opening it switches to having a skype like call with voice acting.

Gameplay

Now there are two options for playing this game and one is hard to get use to while the other is still a little bit of a pain but easier to grasp. The buttons are a nightmare not going to sugar coat it because the analog stick controls a pointer which is hard to control due to how touchy it can be. The touchscreen is a bit easier just because you can just touch things and they work well there is just a lot of things for you to do which can sometimes be easier using buttons. Each level gives you paths the enemies will take along with dozens of squares where you can put your units. Units are limited to certain ones for each level but they never tend to be bad for the situation. I gravitate to using a handful of them but there are many to choice from. Enemies do have different types like flying very quickly or slow but tank a lot but your units will have special effects like doing more damage to some of them or slowing down units. Once the level start is when you can crank up the difficulty on your own with auto wave and normal or fast speed. Auto wave is exactly what you think it is, the waves will not stop until you finish all 20. Normal and fast speed is what you think as well with normal being fairly slow and fast being double the speed. Fast is where you should be the bulk of your time since normal can be painfully slow in my opinion.

Personal Experience

I have long passed my days of playing tower defense games like this but it is nice to see this style once again. I’ve put a lot of time in Zotrix just because it was easy to set up and quickly get through a level. If you are playing with fast mode on it only takes a few minutes if you always put your units up quickly. If you are playing on normal speed it could take a while just because of the starting and stopping. I would say if you already played games like this it might be worth checking out but for me I know I liked it a lot but I always spend a lot of time at a desk working. So it was easy to set this up and let it run.

Final Thoughts

While Zotrix doesn’t do anything crazy impressive, it did keep my attention for a very long time. I do hope that they bring over the original game which seems to be a space shooter style game that is fairly cheap on steam. I know Solar is the same price on Steam so making this worthy to own on the go if you like what you see. I would give this game a 7 out of 10!

My Gameplay Footage:

Trailer: (There is no Switch Trailer so this is the PC ones which is a bit different)

End Credits

I was playing through Zotrix and Skee-ball at the same time and man was that a painful game to play through. I hate to be hard on games but when everything is locked behind tickets it is hard to justify a game. Zotrix is a pretty good game, a bit of a bland thing to look at but kept me entertain for close to 15 hours now. I will say a bulk of that was replaying levels and switching between touch screen and buttons to get a feel for both. This will be the last day for my giveaway on the Nintendo Subreddit so must sure to enter all you need to do is post on the thread. As always let me know how you liked the review, follow, subscribe, and I’ll see you in the next review!