Bite the Bullet from Mega Cat Studios and Graffiti Games is a run n gun n eat em up in Nintendo Switch. Learn more in our Bite the Bullet review!
In Bite the Bullet from Mega Cat Studios and Graffiti Games, in the near future, the economic collapse caused by underpopulation and pollution has caused food shortages and starvation. Temporal reprieve was achieved thanks to implantable bionides, which made it possible for humans to consume any organic or inorganic substance. Unfortunately, as time went on, the nodes caused mutations in humans in a process known as ghoulification. This led humans to feel to the stars.
Decades have gone by, and Darwincorp is busy collecting genetic material through the whole galaxy in order to preserve it and to conduct research. For specimens of a, shall we say, “involuntary” nature, mercenaries Chewie and Chewella are brought in to get the job done. You will control one or the other as they’re sent to Earth to collect eight different organisms for the Compendium. You are to do whatever it takes to complete your mission, so be ready to destroy everyone – and everything – in your path!
There are two controller options for Bite the Bullet. In both, you will move with the left analog stick as you aim with the right one. Press down on the right analog stick, and you will open your radial menu. As for interacting/eating, this is mapped to the A button. You can also transform by pressing down on the D-Pad once you have managed to obtain enough energy from all of the eating you’ll be doing, from the enemies you battle or the different sources of nutrition you will find. Transform into your Zombro form, and you’ll become extremely powerful for a short period of time, so be sure to make the most of it!
The rest of the buttons do different things depending on if you’re using the Pro or Noon controller layout. In the Pro layout, you dash with the L button, jump with ZL, fire with ZR, use the secondary fire mode with the R button, change weapons with the X button, use abilities with the B button, activate the shield with the Y button. When selecting the Noob layout, dash is set to ZR, jump to the B button, fire to the Y button, secondary fire to the X button, you change weapons with the R button, use abilities with ZL, and use tour shield with the L button.
Eating will be a core part of the experience. Once you stun an edible enemy, approach it and press the A button. Everything you eat will heal some of your lost hit points while also giving you some calories, fat, and protein. These serve as energy, which is used for performing actions. Energy is needed for everything, from jumping to activating special abilities, so eating is a must. If you eat a lot of protein, then you’ll be nimble and strong, but will require more resources to function. If you eat everything you find and get a lot of fat into your system, you will grow in size, but at least you’ll have some extra defense in the process!
As you defeat your opponents, you will be rewarded with experience points. Collect enough experience points, and your character will level up. What does gaining a level do? With every level you get, you will also be able to get some SP points. SP points can be allocated at the end of a stage to unlock new classes – such as the Gorivore, which makes it so that you can only eat meat and not mechanical or plant-based food sources while gaining some special kill skills and bile attacks – as well as to unlock boosts to your character. Each of the classes will also have extra boosts to unlock by way of SP. These can include extra hit points, gaining more fat from meat, or making your body convert one unit of fat into three calories every 15 seconds, to name some examples.
While playing through each stage in Bite the Bullet, you can try to complete some extra objectives to spice things up. You could aim to finish a stage in 10 minutes or less, to kill ten enemies within 30 seconds, to defeat three enemies with a single grenade, collect a ton of fat, or focus heavily on protein. You will know when you’ve completed one of these objectives because a message will pop up on the screen.
You do need to be careful so that you don’t end up eating something that has gone bad. If you see green mold spores coming off from something, then you might want to skip it, or else you could end up sick. Just like you wouldn’t eat something from your fridge that seems to be growing some extra life on top of it, eating food with the green mold spores is certainly a bad idea. If you get sick, you’ll throw up, which will do a number on your calories, but at least there’s an upside to the whole thing!
You see, these bad, bad sources of food will act as sort of special crafting stations where you’ll be able to upgrade your weapons by adding a little bit of this or that in exchange for some of the resources you’ve secured. You could roll the dice and select to add a random mod to one of your weapons, pick to add a specific mod from the available options, reroll mods to randomly reassign passive modifiers for a weapon, reroll the base damage, add a random keystone, or a specific keystone. Keystones are super-powerful effects that can make a big difference but adding those are going to cost you a ton.
If you’re looking for a run n gun that combines a dash of old-school games like Contra, with being able to eat everything in your path – as long as you don’t change to a class that can only eat one particular type of food source – as well as the option of improving your character within a huge skill tree, then Bite the Bullet might be exactly what you need. The game’s physics do take a bit of trial and error before you can start to make your jumps work just right, but other than that and how the game’s text being a bit tiny, which makes it harder to read the nutritional facts of each enemy or thing you’re going to eat – which is twice as hard to do when playing in Portable or Tabletop Mode – I liked what the game has to offer. Bite the Bullet is out now on Nintendo Switch with a $14.99 asking price.
Disclaimer
This Bite the Bullet review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Graffiti Games.
