ION Shift (Switch)
In the Alien movie franchise, it’s easy to see why people would be terrified of the Xenomorphs, the human-sized extra-terrestrials easily a threat to people isolated far out in space. However, it can be easy to forget the Xenomorph begins life small enough to burst out of a person’s chest. ION Shift has no official ties to the Alien series, but it almost feels like it’s the tale of the smaller form of a Xenomorph, this precision platformer about a highly vulnerable but highly deadly little alien going on a killing spree that you’re in control of.
ION Shift starts with the spaceship Orin picking up a rescue capsule with a single member of the prestigious ION squad on board. Shortly after allowing him on board, a small extra-terrestrial bursts out of his body, this Shifter now seemingly on a single-minded quest to kill everyone on board and destroy the Orin alongside them. The Shifter itself seems to mostly be a creature running on this destructive desire, but every now and then there are short scenes between levels checking in on the captain and his assistant, and while these start off doing simple things like showing how the heavily armed crew’s response to the Shifter keeps escalating, eventually things take a turn for the comedic. The dialogues stop focusing on plot details and start becoming rather silly and self-aware, which, while it feels a bit at odds with this game’s dark look and frequent violence, does admittedly make them worth paying more attention to. What goes from a practical means of establishing setting and making the captain look like a target worthy of being hunted down becomes a way to get a quick dose of humor before you’re back in the vents hopping around as a bloodthirsty alien.
The Shifter is a mix of deadly and easy to kill, necessitating a combination of stealth and speed to safely clear rooms. Not every room demands you kill every troop that’s patrolling, but it’s often wise to do so even when it’s not a necessity. The moment a soldier spots you, you’ll hear a technological chirp to alert you to the danger and you have a bit to get out of sight before they’ll open fire, a single bullet enough to end a Shifter. While the Shifter can crawl on walls and ceilings, its main tool of survival is its fast leap, the player able to angle the jump in whichever direction they please. Hit a soldier while pouncing and it will be an instant kill as you pass through them, save for some of the later heavy troopers or ones with shields. Turrets and floating mines prove dangerous to a creature whose main means of attack is to jump right at the target though, but your extraterrestrial’s little prehensile tail allows you to pick up objects. By hurling items about, you can trigger turrets to shoot allies, prematurely detonate mines, or if it is something like a knife or grenade, you can outright kill a soldier or even destroy a turret.
Levels are split into smaller chunks with checkpoints in the air vents connecting them, and perhaps most importantly, a death in ION Shift is incredibly easy to recover from. A quick button press will respawn you right at the last checkpoint so you can attempt the room again, it not too likely you’ll be irritated since you can get right back to figuring out the safe way through an area. ION Shift can at times be very fast-paced in a clustered room where you need to dash through multiple soldiers quickly to survive or it can be a more methodical sneaking affair if you want to set up the safest kills, although there are a few levels that change the design a bit. At first, ION Shift is about clearing room after room, many having some clear intended routes you can spot and the execution challenge is what can make them tough or lead to tens of deaths. Eventually though you’ll get some stages that are chases down halls where you need to outrun a pursuer, meaning you need to be much faster when it comes to launching yourself around and weaving through tight deadly spaces full of razor sharp fans and fire jets. This is where one small element of ION Shift’s controls can hold it back a touch. When you are crawling across walls or ceilings and reach a corner, you need to change the direction you’re pushing the control stick to match the new surface. This may sound somewhat reasonable, but it also slows you down when crawling across small surfaces with many consecutive corners, and when the timing is tight, that half second of delay can cause a death. The chases can also be more like gauntlets than other areas, likely to lead to many of your deaths in a run through the story as they mix speed, strict movement requirements, and the controls that could do with being more responsive.
The Switch’s Joycons don’t have the best control sticks either for pointing precisely where you wish to leap in the small window you might have it, something that can be a bit frustrating when you’re trying to weave through the detection ranges on turrets and mines that sometimes leave little room for error. ION Shift can provide some tense and exciting chases despite the occasional control quibble, but the regular rooms might be the better part of it for letting you plot out your routes and have more room to react if you slip up a little. The late game stages do start to get more creative and involved in a good way, a particular level design type emerging where you have one massive area to explore with plenty of targets to try and attack, although the checkpoints within that open space are easy to trigger repeatedly when perhaps the room would be more of a compelling challenge if you could only activate each one once. There are higher difficulties like one without checkpoints entirely, but even with the strong safety nets, the later levels really feel like a nice escalation of the gameplay style even if the game will find it ending fairly soon after the new formula is introduced.
ION Shift technically features 16 levels, although as mentioned many are made up of multiple little rooms or a couple large spaces and chases. There are a few undercooked ideas in ION Shift that maybe would have benefited from the game being longer, the actual experience only around a few hours unless its difficulty and precision platforming end up stumping you. For example, the Shifter is able to take control of specific enemies, this usually used to walk past turrets or take doors to teleport you around a level space, but it feels like the start of an idea since it’s use is fairly minimal save for one inspired moment. You can replay each level individually after beating them and select their difficulty from the four on offer, the game tracking which stages you beat on which level. It is a simple form of replayability, but it can at least give you something to go for after clearing the campaign.
THE VERDICT: ION Shift’s Shifter is a well balanced killer creature, its speedy movement and lethal dash making for swift satisfying attacks but the enemies you face are able to take you out just as quickly. The precision platforming is supported well by the quick respawns even if sometimes the movement windows feel a bit tight for the type of controls ION Shift went with. Some idea iteration does start to shift up how you approach your sometimes stealthy, sometimes chaotic pushes through the spaceship Orin, but it also feels like some of its best concepts come up too close to the end, making you wish you got to spend more time exploring them before the alien’s killing spree comes to its end.
And so, I give ION Shift for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. ION Shift’s a game with a few little quirks, like how you navigate menus by using the B button instead of A and taking corners doesn’t feel quite clean, but it does do pretty well with its most important parts. Your dash lets you not just zip through enemies for quick kills but also reach new ground swiftly, the dash even pretty easy to chain together rapidly which can be used for either smooth surges through those chase sections or desperate scrambles to escape when you threw yourself into a situation improperly. It does feel like it stews a bit too long in its earlier concepts, the new room layouts of course meaning its not boring since you have to plan new approaches or deal with the one or two new dangers that serve as part of the game’s gradual rollout of hazards, but perhaps tapping more deeply into the idea of taking control of people or making more use of the large interconnected rooms sooner could have lead to a game that gets its hooks into you more deeply. ION Shift still rewards precision play and as a result, conquering the hard stretches of it does come with some pride, but the spaceship setting does feel rather drab as you pass through so many similar rooms and the regular room clearing can start to blur together a bit.
ION Shift’s level design and gameplay format feel like a nice fit for each other, meaning it does provide the main appeal of a precision platformer. You come to master your movement and understand your options even if there’s a few aspects of it that could be cleaner, and clearing out the spaceship’s tougher rooms definitely serves as solid tests of your skill. ION Shift perhaps just needed more room to grow to continue some of the promising evolutions found in its later stages, but the Shifter’s warpath through the Orin is still one with enough action puzzles to figure out to make it potentially worth a look.