Gori: Cuddly Carnage - Switch Review

Jake Mounsey -

Fuelled by insatiable demand, 'Cool-Toyz Inc.' created 'Ultra Pets'. The ultimate companions that never hunger, never require bathroom breaks and are impervious to the ravages of time. Little did anyone expect the mutation that transformed these perfect pets into twisted toys straight from your nightmares.

In Gori: Cuddly Carnage, humanity has been destroyed and it's up to Gori, along with his deadly but wise-cracking sentient hoverboard, F.R.A.N.K, and morose AI companion, CH1-P, to slay the evil Adorable Army with style!

The Good

As soon as I loaded into the first level of Gori: Cuddly Carnage, I could feel the amount of care that went into nailing the game’s movement controls. Everything immediately feels right and just about every button I pushed did what I thought it was going to do, making the controls feel very tight and intuitive.

Gori: Cuddly Carnage is a character action game like the Devil May Cry series or just about every game Platinum makes. While it isn’t on the same technical level with its combat system, it's still very satisfying nonetheless. The player is given bladed attacks to cut through fleshy enemies, strong blunt attacks to deal with armoured enemies with the added benefit of being an aerial launcher and rockets for flying enemies. Each of these attacks can also be powered up at the cost of your hoverboard’s fuel, which can be refilled in combat by wallriding, grinding on rails or by performing glory kills akin to Bethesda’s take on the Doom franchise, leading to the game’s combat being fun, hectic and stylish.

TL;DR

  • Tight controls
  • Satisfying combat

The Bad

Gori: Cuddly Carnage very clearly WASN’T made with the Switch in mind. The only time the game will run at a decent frame rate is whenever you’re not in combat or a hectic platforming challenge. Heck, the game can’t even render Gori’s fur properly; it just makes the game look really unappealing.

For the most part, Gori: Cuddly Carnage’s controls are fine, but the longer you play it, the more you realise that doing basic attacks just won’t cut it, meaning you will be holding the ZR button down to power up your attacks for most of your time in combat, which can lead to hand cramping.

Now I’m not a prude when it comes to harsh language; heck, I grew up in a bogan household (a bogan is like an Australian redneck), so I have swearing hard coded in my blood but the amount of swearing and course language used in Gori: Cuddly Carnage is too much for me. Not that I find it offensive; it more comes off as very childish. It’s like a twelve-year-old who has just discovered what swears are after playing their first online match of Call of Duty. It has no impact and feels like the writers use it as a crutch because they didn’t think their game about an anthropomorphic cat riding a hoverboard decapitating monstrous unicorns wasn’t edgy enough.

TL;DR

  • Looks and runs poorly on Switch
  • Default control layout can lead to hand cramps
  • Written by a twelve year old who just learned about swear words

Final Score: 6/10

Gori: Cuddly Carnage feels like a game you’d find in a bargain bin during the 360/PS3 era and I mean that in the nicest way possible. You just don’t get games like this anymore—low-budget games with a gameplay first mentality that isn’t afraid to be out there and weird. Gori: Cuddly Carnage really reminds me of games like Lollipop Chainsaw, MadWorld and No More Heroes, just to name a few.

Thank you for checking out our Gori: Cuddly Carnage Switch review, thank you to Wired Productions for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support: