Percaminosa Switch Review
| Platform | Nintendo Switch |
| Release Date | 5/27/2021 |
| Cost | $14.99 |
| Publisher | 2Awesome Studios |
| Rating | M |
You are a hard boiled drunk private eye in a grimy city named Percaminosa. One night you wake up the ghost of a guy you killed and 2 Mexican style skeletons in sombreros. He wants to kill and a bunch of dudes so he can go off to Heaven. You accept.
Your first order of business is to get your gun back from the pawn shop next door. You beat up a dude in a grungy hotel to get money to pay the pawn broker. You get your gun. Then you go to a brothel to find the whereabouts of this guy, you find him in his garage on the docks and fight him in a surprising well done boss fight. Then on to the next guy you have to kill, where you help a walking racist Asian stereotype, trudge through a police station, then catacombs fighting zombies and spiders, and I kind of gave up at that point because I couldn’t take the game seriously. I was also out of bullets, and it wouldn’t have been hard to redo the dungeon, but, as I said, I didn’t care.
Percaminosa is an action RPG at heart. You go around aim with R stick and R to shoot or throw punches. Weapons and items can be mapped to the direction buttons. You get XP from killing enemies and completing quests. You level up via L.I.F.E system(luck, intelligence, force and endurance). Level up in 2 different stats enough, you get a perk you can use(there are 4 perks). You also have clothes that give perks, like luck for your initial outfit and force for the police uniform.
The game play is fine, the graphics are charming, even the music is pretty good. The issue in Percaminosa is the story, which is wildly inconsistent. Sure it starts off the with Mexican skeletons, but gets serious as soon as its done, then you beat up a trash bag to get a bottle of Mack Daniels(which you use to heal), then it gets serious again for a pretty long while, then you help the walking Asian stereotype who talks like Confucius. Then it gets serious again, then you randomly fight a guy in a boxing ring and have to purposely lose in the Police Station. Then it gets serious. Then you fight those zombies and spiders in catacombs.
What is Percaminosa? Is it a parody of Noir, or a serious Noir game? It cannot be both. I wager I could go on, but I cannot take it seriously enough to do so. Maybe you can get farther than I chose to, and probably should, cause there a good game lurking beneath the silliness.
Overall: Percaminosa’s wildly inconsistent story mars what is a decent action RPG.
Verdict: YMMV