Review

8-Colors Star Guardians + - Switch Review

"While 8-Colors Star Guardians + is a good game, it is severely held back by its lack of overall gameplay."

Jake Mounsey

• 3 min read
8-Colors Star Guardians + - Switch Review
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Who didn’t want to be a Power Ranger as a kid? C’mon, show of hands. Don’t lie to me, I know I did. 8-Colors Star Guardians + is a Power Rangers/Super Sentai inspired turn based RPG inspired by 8-bit MS-DOS games of the past. After losing her planet to a great evil, Princess V’iri travels to earth in search of powerful warriors to aid her in defeating this evil for good.

The Good

As mentioned previously, 8-Color Star Guardians + is heavily inspired by 8-Bit MS-DOS games and it nails the aesthetic perfectly. With its limited colour palette and characters having single digit frames of animation, it emulates the style immaculately. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this game running on an Amiga 500.

While 8-Colors Star Guardians + is a turn based RPG, it has more of a classic Megaman style progression system. Instead of gaining experience and levelling up, your party will learn new skills that counter a boss’ mechanics, giving the game a quicker, snappier pace.

8-Colors Star Guardians + has a surprising amount of character building for a game of its size. After each boss fight, your party will have a short conversation with each other, which fleshes out their character while also alluding to the power they obtain from defeating the boss. You really get a sense that these characters have been built up in the developer’s mind for a long time, and this is their way of sharing them with the world.

TL;DR

  • Captures MS-DOS art style perfectly
  • Well thought out progression
  • Charming writing

The Bad

8-Colors Star Guardians + is quite the cheap game on the Nintendo eShop, so I wasn’t expecting it to be a grand 20+ hour epic, but I also wasn’t expecting to beat the entire game in a little over half an hour. It was a very deflating feeling knowing that the game had just finished when I was just starting to enjoy myself.

What makes the short length sting even worse is the lack of replayability. While there is an additional arcade mode that gives you a turn limit to defeat bosses, by that point, you’d already know what bosses give you, making the arcade mode trivial.

TL;DR

  • Too short even for its price point
  • No replayability

Final Score: 5/10

While 8-Colors Star Guardians + is a good game, it is severely held back by its lack of overall gameplay, leaving it feeling pretty forgettable. And as if to prove my own point, I completely forgot I needed to write this review, so I’m hastily writing it the day before it is meant to be submitted…oops.

Thank you for checking out our 8-Colors Star Guardians + Switch review, thank you to Flynns Arcade for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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