Popeye Switch Review

When I heard about this game, I was told it’s the worst game on the Switch, a game totally devoid of redeeming qualities or passion. After having played Popeye, I can say that no, it is not the worst game on the Switch I’ve played. Reasoning of Courage is. Soulsland is a close second. I would put this game as the third worst game I’ve played on the Switch. It is indeed devoid of redeeming qualities or passion. It’s not even worthy of a Hilariously Awful verdict, because there is nothing to like here. So let’s begin:

Let’s start of with the title screen: it’s completely devoid of music. You would think an officially licensed Popeye game would have the famous theme. It actually does, for five seconds when you eat spinach. In fact, the only music that will really ever play is a thirty-second loop of a generic pirate theme. There are also no voices for the main characters except Olive Oil, who says exactly one line. There are also the caws of the vulture, which were done by an intern.

Popeye takes place in three levels—a small pirate town, a large pirate town, and a pirate ship. In the towns, Olive Oil will throw hearts down and you’ll catch them. Brutus, the vulture, and the witch (a skull) will be after you, but they can be easily avoided. There is spinach to eat. When you do, you glow red for a bit and can punch the baddies away for a while. But you never need to use it, except on the cramped pirate ship. On the ship, Olive Oil will throw letters down that form a sentence, but otherwise, the gameplay is the same, except worse. This is because there’s little room to move to avoid the bad guys.

Popeye is not fun. You will never experience fun while playing it. What you will experience is sheer boredom. It’s not particularly broken. For example, you rarely get stuck on world geometry. When you do, you plop into the water a fair bit away. But that doesn’t mean anything when the game itself is so pedestrian and boring. It will be banished to the recesses of your mind, only to reappear in nightmares where you’re forced to play this for all eternity.

Overall: Popeye is not even just bad, it’s excruciatingly boring. There was no effort or passion put into developing this.

Verdict: Garbage

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