Modern Combat: Blackout (Switch)

Also available on Android, iOS, and Windows

There's a reason I'm deeply prejudiced against mobile games;  most of the are rubbish.  There are some genuinely good mobile games, for sure, but the overwhelming majority are garbage or, at best, mediocre.  Modern Combat: Blackout is a mobile game that got ported to Switch, and even with a port to a home console - even an underpowered and aging one - only got it up to "mediocre," although with a generic search engine bait name like "Modern Combat," I can't say that I'm terribly surprised.

The premise of the game is that your character works as a mercenary for a private military company (which is just a modern euphemism for band of mercenaries to avoid issues with international law) but finds out that the PMC is up to some shady and unethical shit.  You know, like literally every PMC that's ever existed.  So now you and your handful of allies get to play hero and try to expose the plot or whatever.  Honestly, the story is paper thin; it makes Steven Segal movies look like well-constructed narrative events.  This game is obviously a creative legacy of the Xbox 360 era where every game involved modern combat, a barely sensical plot, and various shades of brown and occasionally green (although, to its credit, this game does use a couple other colors, too).

The game is your run of the mill first person shooter.  When you're looking around or firing from the hip, you use the right analog stick to aim; when you're aiming down the sights, you can use gyroscopic controls.  Since the stick aiming is jerky as hell, you're basically going to be using gyroscopic aiming 99% of the time if you ever want to hit anything.  The game awkwardly has auto sprint enabled by default, so if you want to move while crouching - and you will - you'll need to disable that.  Mechanically, the game runs fine.  It only crashed once on me.  It looks okay I guess, although it's painfully obvious that it's a cell phone game that got ported.  The biggest problem is that it's just not that exciting.  Some of the missions are fun, but the game as a whole is just extremely okay.  The explosives suck, too.  Honest to god, they feel like they have no more power than a slightly larger-than-normal firecracker.

I got this game on the eShop on sale for $1.99, and truthfully, that's all it's worth.  For seven hours of something to do - I'm not going to go as far as to call it truly entertainment - $2 is fair, and the online matchmaking will at least put AI bots in to fill gaps in the team rosters from the lack of real humans who actually want to play this game, but there's just no reason to go out and download this game unless you just desperately want a bad dollar store rip-off of Call of Duty 4 on your Switch.  Given how cheap it is when it's on sale, I'm not going to say "omg avoid this game," but I'm most certainly not going to suggest that anyone go download it.

My Rating - 2 Neps