If there’s one thing that most gamers are glad to be done with since the advent of online gaming, it’s screen cheating. Nothing frustrated our 12-year-old selves more than sneaking up on a friend in Goldeneye, only to be thwarted by your victim’s timely glance at your half of the screen. Screen Cheat: Unplugged identifies this problem and then asks: “but what if it were a feature?” Welcome to the shooter where screen cheating is not only expected, but mandatory.

Developer: Samurai Punk

Publisher: Samurai Punk

4 Hours Played // Review Copy Provided // $12.99

Screen Cheat: Unplugged is an arena deathmatch FPS with one unique twist: everyone is invisible. This leaves exactly one method for tracking down and defeating your foes. That’s right. By watching the other players’ screens, you can determine where on the map your opponents are positioned, allowing you to take them down.

Of course, Screen Cheat makes some modifications to the traditional FPS format for these unique mechanics to work. There’s no health bar – everything is 1-hit kill. Imagine trying to track a moving, panicking, invisible target long enough to remove an entire health bar. This is would be unreasonably frustrating. Since the whole game is 1-hit kill, the traditional loadout of FPS weaponry needs to be re-examined and mostly replaced. We can’t have fully automatic assault rifles in this game, otherwise play devolves into a series of spray and pray encounters. Finally, there’s the arenas themselves. If the whole game is focused on locating player positions relative to environmental clues, every single part of a given arena needs to be visually unique.

Well, I certainly won’t be mistaking this for a Call of Duty map.

Screen Cheat uses each of these potential issues as opportunities, similarly to how it has approached the act of screen cheating itself. If traditional FPS weaponry doesn’t work, why keep things realistic? I guess there’s still room for a shotgun, but forget the 12-gauge: let’s get a cartoon-y blunderbuss. Hey, as long as we’re being silly, what about a hobby horse that uses a charge attack? Or an explosive toy-bear projectile?

And hey, if the weapons are wacky? Why use sensible wire frames? They’re only visible post-death anyway.

This unique take on supposed problems extends to its arenas as well. Every stage is divided by color into four quadrants, with varying colors per stage. The effect this has is two-fold. Aesthetically, the game feels less serious and more like a party game because of the dominant, vibrant colors. Mechanically, you can gain a general idea of where your opponents are without actually analyzing their surroundings. As you move on your screen, you can see in your peripherals that an opponent you’re tracking has a dominant blue color visible on their screen, giving you a quick tip as to what quadrant of the map they’re in.

“But what if it was a feature?” must be a saying around the Samurai Punk office.

Now, none of this should be news to people who follow sizable indie releases. Screen Cheat isn’t exactly new – the PC version released back in 2014, after all. So perhaps the real question we should be asking is how the Switch version, Screen Cheat: Unplugged, holds up to the older PC release. For the sake of context, I did play and enjoy the original release, but it has been quite a few years. I admit to not having touched since sometime in early 2017, according to Steam. So, to be fair, keep in mind as I make some direct comparisons that I haven’t experienced any of the PC releases newer updates.

The first thing I noticed about Screen Cheat: Unplugged is the quality of its menu screens. Backgrounds, transitions, and sound effects have been completely reworked since the PC release. The end result is a game that feels more like a AAA title, rather than an indie port. As I played my first few games, this quality remained noticeable, and is a welcome improvement from the blank looking screens and stock sound effects that I remember in the original release.

Clean, slick menus with tons of options is definitely a plus.

With regards to controls, Screen Cheat: Unplugged is something of a mixed bag. I don’t make it a secret that I’m a huge fan of motion control aim. Splatoon solidified to me that motion control should be the future of console shooters, despite what console FPS fundamentalists and purists say. I should be ecstatic to find that this Switch release does include motion control aiming.

Unfortunately, the implementation of motion aim is weird, to say the least. You don’t aim left and right by turning the controller, the way you do in Splatoon. Instead, you twist your controller, similar to how you turn with tilt controls in Mario Kart. Perhaps this would be preferred by some people, or after enough hours of play, you’d get used to it. I did not. Something about twisting to turn instead of, you know, aiming your controller where you want to aim, feels unintuitive. Thankfully, regular twin-stick controls are available, and they function perfectly well out of the box.

Despite Screen Cheat remaining a fantastic game, the only good thing I have left to say about Screen Cheat: Unplugged is that it performs well. Beyond that, there’s a pile of questionable decisions and lacking features that I can’t quite wrap my head around.

It’s been 12-15 games, and I only just unlocked my third weapon?

Unlike the original, this version of the game requires you to unlock, well, basically everything. You start the game with one map, one weapon, and one game mode. As you play, you unlock the other features through a leveling system. Perhaps this is a great opportunity to slowly explore all the features the game has, but as someone coming from experience with the PC version, this was a huge deterrence. When I was playing for review-sake, I found myself slogging through games to try and get to new unlocks. So many are behind dozens of hours of play and I just don’t care, especially when I could simply load up the PC version of Screen Cheat.

Level 30? I appreciate the cool modes but just let me play around with them now.

Worse, this version lacks some serious features. There is no online play. There is no 8-player play. Whether these core features were left out due to technical limitations is entirely beyond me, but they’ll be sorely missed. Ironically, the motion control issues I addressed earlier are rectified if you play in handheld mode, but there’s no multi-console play. You’re effectively limited to playing against bots in this mode, which kills the value of a nostalgic couch-multiplayer shooter.

Despite all the polish added to the aesthetics of Screen Cheat: Unplugged, Samurai Punk made some huge missteps with this version. I cannot stress enough that the game itself is still fantastic. If you want to play traditional control style with four friends in front of a TV, there’s nothing wrong with this release. As a result, the game gets a full heart from me. It’s just so unfortunate that, despite being an admitted Nintendo fanboy, I can’t recommend the Switch release. If you have a decent PC and a way to play PC games on your living room TV – I personally use a Steam Link – then there’s little reason to get this release over the original.

Looking for some other multiplayer goodness? Check out our review on Them Bombs. Or maybe something with the same satirical look at video games? Maybe you should check our our Shadow of Loot Box review. Regardless, let me take a minute to say “thanks”. Nindie Nexus remains completely ad-free purely thanks to the passion of our staff. If you’d like to support our efforts or involve yourself in our growing community, please check out our Discord, Youtube channel and our Patreon.