SnK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy: Review

My review of SnK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy is best summed up by a quote from lovely wife,”Why would you want to watch a bunch of musclely dudes beat each other up for hours when you could have beautiful ladies instead”. I completely agree with this statement, it’s why SnK Heroines was a day one buy for me and is definitely one of the better arcade fighters on the Switch.

SnK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy is a fan service game at its core, does that make it a bad game? Not at all. It is unashamed of its fan service; it literally comes right out and says it knows that this is all for fan service. The story mode is all about a SnK villain Kukri, capturing females from different SnK games and putting them in skimpy outfits and making them fight for his enjoyment. In a way, the game is being super meta and Kukri actually represents us, the gamer and how we buy these fan servicey games.  That said, I’m arguably trying to read depth into something that at the end of it all, is a very shallow plot. The plot actually is just the same thing as the Blaze Blue Tag Team Cross plot. Bad guy brings dimensions together and the fighters fight to get back to own dimensions.  The story amounts to nothing and doesn’t really bother with plot. This is a crossover game after all where the focus is on bringing characters together to fight not why they are fighting. 

The Switch has thus far lacked a great 3D model fighter; DragonBall Fighterz and Blaze Blue are good but 2D when you compare it SnK Heroines. A lot of detail went to translating each fighter to this game and it looks and performs wonderfully. Graphics wise it is great except for all the kawaii little items that pop everywhere on every hit. That is only a minor annoyance however, and one you can disable. The main draw of the game is all the different unlocks you can achieve. I love a good fighter that has plenty of good stuff to unlock, so I have more reasons to play. That is why I think the last Smash Bros was so strong. SnK Heroines has three different outfits for every character, tons of unlockable cutscenes, titles, voice packs and more. No extra characters though, sadly. Providing plenty of reasons to keep playing the game. I was able to unlock all the outfits in the game in about five hours, but once you have them all, you can use all those outfits to make custom ones for each character. I mostly made ridiculous monster creations for the “luls” but you can customize to your heart’s content.

SnK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy is an interesting fighting game in the fact that the health bar is not everything. To finish a fight, you must widdle your opponent’s health bar down to the red zone and then unleash your finishing move, or Dream Finisher. You got that right, you can lose your whole health bar and still continue to fight back until they get a dream finisher off on you. I actually had a few excellent fights online where I fought back after they took down my health bar, to get them to the red zone and finished them off before they could do the same to me. That’s why it is such an exciting system, it gives that bit of hope to the fighter who is losing, so that maybe just maybe they can make a comeback. So this system hopefully leads to more dynamic matches instead of fights that are extremely one sided once one side gets their combo off. The controls are simple but not insultingly so. Just makes it accessible enough so that anyone can jump right in.

Another interesting mechanic that SnK Heroines has is items. Items pop up in front of fights as different color orbs that you have to kick to get open. You can only hold one item at a time but the right type of item at the right time, can turn a fight around. They vary in strength and accessibility in the fight but they add some spice to this fighter. They also make this game feel even more like Smash Brothers by adding that random element of items.

If you are looking for a fighter that is not samey and doesn’t have a bunch of bulky dudes beating each other to a pulp (but instead a bunch of ladies beating each other to a fine pulp), then SnK Heroines might be the fresh fighter you need on your Switch. If you can’t take the fan service, this game kindly shows you the door and lives unabashed. Fun bonus, my favorite SnK character, Terry Bogard gets turned into a woman and it is hilarious. I dig this game. Not enough to spend any money on DLC (though tempting as the roster is not that big at 14 and after almost ten hours, I wanted more), but enough to recommend picking up today. 

7.5 out of 10

TLDR Review : “Why would you want to watch a bunch of musclely dudes beat each other up for hours when you could have beautiful ladies instead”. – My lovely wife