Pocket Rumble review - a slim, strange yet fascinating fighter
On the surface, this is an eerily accurate facsimile of the likes of King of Fighters R-2 or Last Blade: Beyond the Destiny, from its limited pixel count and cut-back colour palette. It apes the chibi style of those games, and even takes the two-button control scheme necessitated by the Neo Geo Pocket's layout and goes about making a virtue of it, all in the name of accessibility. It's a cute idea, executed with no small flair and imagination, though more often than not it can come across as something of an awkward fit.

Pocket Rumble's solution is neat enough, with Cardboard Robot doing away with quarter circles and allowing specials to be pulled off simply by combining one of the two attack buttons with a diagonal input. Even then - and this is a damnation of the Switch's design more than it is of Pocket Rumble - there's a fuzziness that doesn't feel quite right when playing on JoyCon, and a little of the flow of a good fighting game seems to be lost in the blunting of special executions. Still, with a decent fight stick it works, and works well too.
It does go some way towards highlighting a contradiction that's at the heart of Pocket Rumble, though, and one that runs through the whole thing. This is a fighting game that purports to allow all-comers to play, but it's one that's almost impenetrable from the off. The tutorials are ferreted away in a sub-menu, and the single-player offerings are slim and brutally hard. You'd be forgiven for walking away having been repeatedly beaten in the arcade or survival modes, or the career mode that's not much more than an offline approximation of the online experience, with a succession of fights with random AI fighters.

There's Parker, a besuited brawler who can parry or lay down orbs across the stage, setting up traps for opponents to fall into. There's the hulking Quinn who can cling to walls before leaping in with his claws, and can turn into a werewolf; Hector, meanwhile, can heal after pulling off a special and then there's Keiko and June who seem to have stumbled in from BlazBlue, one drawing on a cat that explodes, the other teleporting across the stage and able to summon up a mirror image of themselves.

Should that stop you playing Pocket Rumble? Not at all - it's a neat little curio, full of splendid touches and a cute identity of its own. It's not without a handful of its own problems, though, and it's hardly the most full-featured of fighters. Just know that, as much fun as Pocket Rumble can be, there are plenty of better options out there.
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