Review: Leftovers KO! (Nintendo Switch)
A silly fighting game in which you fight furious, sentient food, Leftovers KO! delivers exactly what it promises. It offers a simple premise presented in a way that doesn’t introduce any unnecessary complication that might get in the way of punching a pizza in the olives.
The game does not have much of a story. It does not explain how or why the food you’ve abandoned to rot around your house has mutated into giant aggressive monsters. You are simply tasked with boxing the monsters to survive. Early on in the game, you receive a phone call from a terrified neighbour which hints at some kind of narrative, but that ends up not building to a larger story.
The gameplay nearly exclusively takes the form of boxing the moldy monsters. The controls are simple. You use one analog stick to dodge attacks. There is one button to punch and another to perform a power-punch, which is particularly strong if attempted at exactly the right moment. There is nothing else to learn aside from the easily identifiable patterns of your enemies.
You track the success of each battle via a health and energy bar at the bottom of the screen. You lose health with each punch you take and energy with each punch you throw. Your energy regenerates but never exceeds your health. If you are beaten down, you won’t have enough energy to win. Your opponents also have a health bar, but it is somewhat misleading as your enemies will get up and fight again if your final move wasn’t a power-punch, though you are never told this in the game. It does get frustrating continuing to reduce a rival’s health to zero with no explanation provided in game as to why they keep getting up.
The key to winning ultimately depends on timing and finding patterns. It’s not terribly difficult to spot the attack and movement routines of each opponent. However, you have to hit each one with just the right special move to unlock the point you need to perform the power-punch you need to do to win. This is harder because there aren’t clues, and figuring out feels less like an interesting puzzle to dive into than hitting the only two buttons you use at all at random until something works. Victory is highly dependent on timing, which again gets frustrating as the controls aren’t responsive enough for it to be so integral to the only real gameplay in Leftovers KO!.
The hand drawn art style is legitimately great. Each of the different enemies you face has a distinct sense of personality about it, characterised by its design and movement. It’s genuinely surprising how much emotion the team have managed to put onto the faces of raging animated food, resulting in some truly delightful expressions when you thump a burger in the buns. The plunging shadows in the background of your dimly lit flat create a compelling sense of fear as an enormous pizza lunges out from the darkness towards you. The art is paired with an equally captivating soundtrack which only adds to the threatening atmosphere and ramps up the tension.
Clearly, a lot of effort has gone into constructing that ambience, and it does do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to drawing you into Leftovers KO!. However, it’s not enough to sustain ongoing interest in a game that is ultimately very repetitive, poorly explained, and highly dependent on a swiftness its clunky controls can’t quite keep up with. The saving grace of Leftovers KO! is that it is at least fairly cheap, with a $10 price tag that gets more reasonable when you factor in the 30% discount currently applied on the Switch store.
