Is this Portal?: A Look At Swap Fire For Wii U

Swap Fire, a first person shooter, came to the Wii U eshop today. I received a review copy from the publisher, but my review isn’t ready yet. Swap Fire is a first person “shooter” where you swap places with people to reach your goal. The game has a lot in common with Portal. In fact, when you play the single player, you’ll have serious Portal vibes. Please read below for a preview of Swap Fire!

You are walking down a hallway and a mysterious voice is leading you through a tutorial of a unique first person “shooter” puzzle mechanic. Is this Portal? No, you are playing Swap Fire for the Wii U.

During single player, you might think you are playing Portal. The hallways look very similar to that game and the voice that’s leading you along is trying desperately to be as funny as the Portal voice. Unfortunately, this single player comes off as a pale imitation of Portal. The voice is not funny or even good and the environments don’t look nice like Portal. The puzzle mechanic is different then that game though. You are not opening portals in Swap Fire, you are changing places with yourself and another object. But everything else seems very much like a poor man’s Portal. At least, in the single player anyway.

In the multiplayer section, you are swapping between yourself and other players (or in my case, bots so far). The action here is a bit more intense and honestly a bit confusing too. The games you are presented with in the multiplayer don’t really have any explanations. I guess that’s why you have to play the single player, though that doesn’t properly prepare you for the multiplayer. You will be swapping places with other players in multiplayer and trying to be number one at the end of each game. Swap Fire isn’t an easy game to understand, but the multiplayer is definitely interesting.

There is only local multiplayer in this game though. Its too bad that the game doesn’t include online multiplayer. Still, if you don’t have any friends to play the game with, you can play the multiplayer with bots and that works well enough.

I’m not impressed at all with Swap Fire’s single player so far. But the multiplayer seems unique and interesting. I need to play this game a lot more before writing up my review. Will Swap Fire turn out just be a Portal copy cat or will it be able to stand on its own? You’ll find out what I think about that, the game’s controls, graphics, and more when the review hits GamesReviews.com. Please stay tuned!