There are a lot of things in Poison Control that feel familiar. The turf war elements remind me of Splatoon. The third-person Action-RPG elements feel like a number of AAA games. The clean-up aspect even has hints of Super Mario Sunshine. All these details combine to form a great game experience and tons of fun on the Nintendo Switch. Here’s my Poison Control review for Switch!

In Poison Control, you play as a mysterious character in a mysterious world. While the colorful environments look inviting, you’re actually in Hell. Poisonette, a girl who hacks your body with her soul, tasks you with helping out with a daunting task. In this Hell, delusions create these monsters that make a mess of everything around you. In order to return to the mortal realm, you’ll need Poisonette’s help to clean things up.

Doing so occurs in a third-person Action-Adventure that has two main gameplay components. Firstly, you’ll shoot enemies using a traditional shooter interface. Likewise, you’ll be spending time clearing up areas of Mario Sunshine-style residue that keeps you from moving through new spaces. The joint effort to take on enemies and clear turf is quite a bit of fun. While the game is colorful in nature, it gets quite overwhelming taking on all these tasks at once. The result is a great gaming experience that lacks depth in the story but keeps you hooked with its gameplay.

As you work to purify the souls of the fallen, you discover some mysteries about how you ended up in this world. It’s not the most incredible narrative, but it’s enough to drive the experience. The real joy here is the gameplay itself. While having to worry about so many things at once, you find yourself hours into the game before you know it. Luckily, there’s a lot to enjoy if you backtrack and try to get better scores in clearing areas.

I’d argue that Poison Control, while nothing Earth-shattering, is a wonderful game. There are clearly influences from other games in this experience but they’ve meshed into a unique and original game. I love the art style quite a bit, and I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoys third-person Action games. The story won’t enthrall you, but you won’t get bored. Heck, you don’t have time to get bored when some of the later levels throw everything they have at you.

Poison Control is a good game but somewhat limited to its third-person style. You learn all there is to do early on and simply repeat in varying difficulties and environments. It’s not a knock, on the contrary, I think the game does what it sets out to do quite well. I’m feeling an 8 is quite fair here, and I recommend fans of other NIS America titles give this one a go.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Poison Control was provided by NIS America for this review.

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Poison Control

$39.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Great Gameplay with Chaotic Moments
• Amazing Art Style and Design
• A Really Fun Blend of Familiar Game Elements

Cons

• A Limited, Lackluster Story
• Gameplay is Repetitive