Charge Kid - Switch Review (Quick)
"Certainly one to try out if you're a fan of the genre."
On their lonesome, pixel perfect jumps are a nightmare, but when paired with pausing and unpausing a bullet to get an extra jump mid-air, it's an entirely new experience with an added level of difficulty. Charge Kid is as tough as the nails you fall on, but it's fair. It has the polish and style of similar entries into the genre and all the difficulty you'd expect from a platformer that flaunts its challenge. It's not just a treat for fans of this type of game but rather a must.
Good
Dying causes an explosion of ghosts to sprawl out of your corpse, and then you are flushed right back to the last checkpoint; bullets leave a trail of red pixel-y effects; the very ground you walk or stand on fizzles with white particles: the details put into every aspect of Charge Kid makes it feel like a truly refined and cared for experience which extends to the tight-knit level design and intricate puzzles. There's a lot of thought put into each aspect of Charge Kid, and it bleeds through in spades. Perhaps the most noteworthy point that truly shows this is in the depth of something as simple as a bullet. You can freeze it mid-air and even boost to its spot which makes for some interesting puzzles as there are points that need to be shot or touched in order to transform your character.
The character will, when these are activated, turn a crimson red, and this means that they can double jump. Some of the levels require you to triple jump in the air, so you have to pause a bullet by the trigger and time your double jump and release perfectly in order to get that third jump while also having enough time to leap and reach the next platform. Failing that, you may plunge too far down and not be able to reach or completely stumble into the spikes altogether. What this makes for is some interesting timing-based challenges that certainly adds a lot of value and uniqueness to Charge Kid. It doesn't feel like a generic rehash of Super Meatboy cashing in on the crazy-difficulty of over-the-top platformers with squishy style, but rather it has its own gimmick that completely overhauls the experience, making it stand out.