BE-A Walker

BE-A Walker: Battle for Eldorado is needlessly cruel. The number of things you have to monitor due to the fragility of your craft, combined with the ridiculous cooldown times, make for one of the most off-putting opening levels a game can have. If you're able to power through, the rest of the game is monotonous, even if you get lucky enough to grab enough funds to mitigate the constantly depleting meters. Combined with a lackluster story and absent fun factor, it'll take someone who really enjoys masochism to power through to the end of the game. With the multitude of better shooters on the system, it's easy to skip this one.

BE-A Walker offers interesting story choices with real moral quandaries and gameplay that rewards precision and patience. But it's steep difficulty curve and repetitive side-quests may turn off some players.

BE-A Walker may be a "walking simulator" but it's nowhere near as humdrum as the genre suggests. The easy to pick up, difficult to master controls make the Joy-Cons work in tandem, in near-perfect harmony. The difficulty curve may be too much for some to handle, but if you're looking for a satisfying challenge, this may just be it.

BE-A-Walker is the first game I can recall that opens with a difficulty spike. The message is clear: get onboard with the game's many anxiety-inducing mechanics or get out now. Beyond that, you will find a moderately entertaining AT-ST simulator. Be ready to juggle a variety of frustrating systems, as nothing in this game comes easy.

All in all, BE-A Walker is far from being a bad game, but it’s pretty hard to recommend. Its gameplay loop gets tiresome pretty quickly, and being inspired by one of the most generic and uninspired movie plots of the entire century really doesn’t help. You can have a few minutes of fun blowing up tons of natives (or humans, it’s up to you) with a rocket launcher-powered mech, but this won’t be a game that will captivate you for hours on end.

Ever since Return of the Jedi who hasn't contemplated taking the role of an AT-ST pilot and ramping through some Ewok villages, shooting and stomping the little buggers while laughing maniacally? Or is it just me? Wisely side-stepping the inevitable lawsuits that making such a game outright would inspire the people behind BE-A Walker take the basics of that experience and let you roll with it...